The Paying Guests

  ‘What? No, don’t say that.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No!’ Lilian pushed herself up and caught hold of Frances’s arm. ‘It doesn’t change anything about you and me. Don’t think that. That’s not why I’m telling you. It just makes things more difficult for us.’

  ‘Difficult? That’s putting it mildly! You think we can manage, with a child? You think he’ll let us? He’ll have the law on his side. He’ll have everything on his side!’

  ‘But I don’t want to have Len’s baby. I don’t want any baby at all. If it won’t sort itself out, then – then I’ll sort it out myself.’

  Again Frances was aware of the drumming of the raindrops. Drawing back from Lilian slightly, she said, in a hushed, shocked voice, ‘Get rid of it? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes. It isn’t so bad, Frances. When it’s only just started there are pills you can take to put yourself right —’

  ‘Oh, Lilian, no. You can’t be serious. It’s too squalid.’

  ‘I don’t care, so long as they work.’

  ‘I can’t believe they ever do. And God knows what goes into them.’

  ‘They do work, if you get the right ones, and you take them at just the right time.’ Her tone was certain, knowing. She coloured. ‘Don’t look at me like that. It’s only what lots of women do.’

  Frances was staring at her. ‘You’ve taken them before?’

  ‘Only once. Frances, I had to. It was the year after we got married, a few months after I’d lost my baby. I – I couldn’t face it. It felt all wrong. I got it into my head, you see, that it would happen again. Vera has a friend who’s a nurse, and she got the pills for me. They made me feel dreadful. I thought I was dying! I tried to do it on my own, but in the end I had to tell Len. He nearly had a fit. He thought his parents would find out. We had to do it all in secret, all in their tiny little house. But it won’t be so bad if I do it again, because this time I’ll know what to expect. I just can’t do it alone, that’s all. I thought of doing it and not telling you, but – It’s just too hard, when you’re on your own. I can get the pills. I can go to a shop —’

  ‘A shop? What shop? What shop are you talking about?’

  ‘There’s a place in Town, on the Edgware Road. Vera’s friend told me about it. I can get them. I know what to ask for. But I’ll need you to help me when the worst bit happens.’

  She had clearly thought it all through. Frances was struggling to keep up with her. To be casually discussing this, there in her bedroom, on Champion Hill, on a rainy Monday morning —

  ‘Surely there’s another way?’

  ‘There isn’t, Frances.’

  ‘You might make yourself ill!’

  ‘I don’t care about that.’

  ‘Well, I do. One hears such stories. It isn’t safe.’

  ‘No, no, it only isn’t safe when it’s become a real baby, when you leave it too long and have to put something in there to get the baby out. But that’s different. That’s unnatural. That’s a sin, and against the law. I’d never do that.’

  ‘But what you’re talking about is just the same.’

  ‘No, Frances. It isn’t.’

  She spoke with certainty again – with impatience, even. Frances couldn’t tell if she had genuinely misunderstood the process, or had simply decided on a convenient course of belief and was sticking to it. Either way – God, how monstrous it was! How different from the pure, true thing she’d had in mind!

  She felt exposed, suddenly. She felt cold and under-dressed. She rose and crossed the room to her armchair, sat at the front of it, her limbs drawn in.

  Lilian watched her. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m trying to realise it,’ she said. ‘I feel… caught out. Tripped up. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You mustn’t feel that. It’s isn’t so bad. It’s —’

  ‘When did it happen, exactly?’

  The abruptness of the question made Lilian blink. ‘What? I’ve told you.’

  ‘Yes, but which night? That’s what I mean. Which particular night?’

  ‘Oh, what does it matter? It’s happened, that’s all.’

  ‘Was it that night when you were ironing? The night I came into the kitchen?’

  ‘The kitchen?’ Lilian frowned. ‘No. No, it must have been after that. I don’t know when it was, Frances.’

  Just some ordinary night, then. Just one of those nights when Frances had lain there listening for the sound of the door…

  Lilian was still watching her. ‘Don’t you want us to be together? You did, a minute ago. You said you would help me to be brave.’

  ‘I didn’t know this would be a part of it.’

  ‘You said you’d give things up for me. Why won’t you let me give this up, for you?’

  And at that, Frances felt a touch of horror. Was this, after all, what she had persuaded Lilian into? She rubbed her bare shoulders, a shiver pimpling her skin. She knew that she ought to go back to the bed, take Lilian in her arms. But she couldn’t do it; she felt paralysed. She kept thinking of herself lying here, while just across the landing —

  Didn’t they say that a woman had to enjoy it, in order for a pregnancy to take?

  She shook the idea off. Lilian was about to become hers. That was the point to remember. That was the destination of it all. It had happened, it was dreadful, but they couldn’t be kept apart, could they, by such a little, little thing?

  She rose, returned to the bed, and they held each other tightly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lilian said again. ‘I’m so sorry. Don’t hate me, Frances. I love you so much. But it isn’t as bad as you think. It’s just a nuisance. It’s just… nothing. It’s like a bad tooth that has to come out. Once I’ve done it, we can forget it. We can be together, just like you said.’

  When Frances’s mother returned to the house at lunch-time, fresh from her morning with the vicar, Frances could hardly bring herself to meet her gaze. She could hardly meet Leonard’s gaze, either, when he came home from work. Her excitement about the future that she and Lilian were planning – it was lost, overwhelmed, a single pale thread in a dark, dark tangle. Lying in bed that night, she tried to pull the thing apart. Suppose the baby were to be born. Could the two of them manage? It would be hard, but not impossible, not impossible at all. Other women managed it, with less money than they would have. There were thousands of fatherless families, since the War… But in her heart, she didn’t want it. Apart from anything else, it would be a permanent link with Leonard, even assuming that he would let them keep the child. It might draw Lilian back to him. It might somehow repair their marriage. And what would Frances do then? Would she return to her old life, her loveless, Lilianless life, like a snake having to fit itself back into a desiccated skin?

  The idea made her panic, and the panic itself dismayed her. For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting? How real was the passion she had with Lilian, after all? She remembered how flimsy it had appeared after Edith’s visit. Right there, in the darkness, it seemed suddenly to be founded on nothing. They had never spent a night together. They had never eaten a meal together – only foolish picnics in the park. And they were making all these plans, contemplating all these sacrifices, and forcing sacrifices on to other people, on to her mother, on to Leonard…

  She lay sleepless for two or three hours, and rose the next day feeling wretched.

  But Lilian, by contrast, looked better than she had looked in weeks. As soon as the two of them were alone she took hold of Frances’s hands; her rings, of course, were back on their finger. She had been thinking, she said, about when they ought to ‘do it’.

  ‘It has to be soon,’ she whispered. ‘The sooner you do it, the better it works. And if you take the pills around the time you should be falling poorly, then that works best of all. That would be this coming Sunday, for me. Well, that’s no good, because Len
’ll be home. Saturday’s the same. But on Friday night he’s going out, straight from work; he’s seeing Charlie. And didn’t you say that your mother’s going out then, too? Round to her friend’s?’

  Yes, Frances remembered, there was to be a bridge party that night at Mrs Playfair’s. She herself had been invited, a fortnight before. She had said no – wanting to remain at home, in earshot of Lilian and Leonard. And all the time —

  ‘You’re not changing your mind?’ Lilian asked her, seeing the shift in her expression.

  She answered with a frown. ‘No, I – It’s just all moving so quickly. I still can’t believe in it all. I can’t believe there won’t be some difficulty, some disaster. If my mother should find out —’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘We can’t be sure.’

  ‘We can. We must be sure, because being sure will help the pills work. I’m going to get them today.’

  ‘Today? But can’t we take a little more time? I feel I’ve talked you into something, and —’

  ‘It isn’t like that.’

  ‘Well, then, you’ve talked me into something. And I know I’ve let you do it, against my sense of what’s right, because I love you and it’s the way to having you all to myself, and – I don’t know if that’s brave or cowardly, or what it is.’

  Lilian laid a hand on her cheek. ‘Oh, Frances. It’s nothing so serious as that.’

  ‘Are you certain about this? Lilian, are you absolutely certain?’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind to it. Whether you help me or not, I’m going to do it.’

  ‘But in another day or two —’

  ‘No. It has to be today. Now that I’ve decided, I – I just want to be rid of it.’ She moved her hand to her belly, placed it there with a look of distaste. ‘I can’t stand to think of it inside me, getting bigger every minute.’

  Frances watched her, uneasily. She said at last, ‘Well, you can’t go alone. I won’t let you go alone. Suppose something should happen to you?’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen. Women do this all the time. Married women, I mean, as well as other sorts of women. But I don’t want you to have to go into a horrible chemist’s shop with me. It’ll make you stop loving me. It’ll make you hate me! It’s my problem, and I’m going to fix it.’ She squeezed Frances’s hand again. ‘Please trust me, Frances.’

  Reluctantly, Frances returned the pressure of her fingers.

  But, still, she wouldn’t let her go off entirely on her own. In a sheepish sort of way, she told her mother that she and Lilian had decided to visit a gallery, and after lunch they took a tram into Town; Lilian said that a tram would be better than a bus, because it would jolt her about more and ‘might help things along’. The thought was a ghastly one to Frances. She made the journey as tensely as if she were carrying a child herself. But Lilian’s spirits seemed high. When they parted at Oxford Circus, Frances stood for a minute watching her make her way westward through the crowd of shoppers, and her step didn’t slow once.

  It was half-past two, and they’d arranged to meet again at four, in Cavendish Square. The day was another damp one, but Frances had brought along an umbrella; she raised it and began to walk, taking random turns. With every step, she felt her disquiet mounting by another notch. She oughtn’t to have let Lilian go off alone. They oughtn’t to have come. What on earth were they doing? Everywhere she looked she saw prams, she saw babies with pink, alive faces.

  At last, realising how close she was to Clipstone Street, she crossed a road and went the few hundred yards to call on Christina.

  But the visit was a mistake – she could tell that at once. It had come too soon after the last one, and Christina was busy; she invited Frances in, but her gaze kept wandering over to the papers on her desk. When Frances began to tell her about Lilian, she listened long enough only to hear that the two of them had reconciled their differences and said, ‘Oh, Frances, I can’t keep pace with you! I thought the whole thing had come to nothing.’

  ‘I was frightened that it had,’ said Frances.

  ‘Well, you don’t sound very happy that it hasn’t.’

  ‘No. I —’

  But what could she say? She was ashamed, she realised. She longed to speak, to unburden herself; she remembered the bond she had felt with Christina at the music hall. She could find no trace of it now. There was merely the old scratchiness – that bit of cinder in the soap. So they talked of stupid, pointless things. She stayed for less than twenty minutes, and wished she hadn’t come at all.

  But before she left she looked around the room, that was so full of Christina and Stevie. She and Lilian would have a room like it, once this horrible thing was done.

  And when, half an hour later, seated on a bench in Cavendish Square, she spotted Lilian herself, hurrying across the garden towards her, she felt a jolt of uncomplicated love in her heart, simply at seeing her, there, among strangers. She looked flushed, damp, pleased. She joined Frances beneath the umbrella and spoke breathlessly.

  ‘I thought I’d never get here in time! The shop turned out not to be right after all. The man sent me to another, on the Charing Cross Road. He was awful about it. He acted as though I was on the streets or something. I kept my gloves off, to show my ring; he made me feel it had come off a curtain! But it doesn’t matter. The second man was all right. And I got them. Look.’

  She began to unclasp her bag. Frances glanced around in alarm. But the light was poor, people were hurrying because of the rain, vehicles were loud on the wet roads: it felt oddly intimate under the silk of the umbrella. Lilian opened the bag just enough to reveal the buff-coloured packet inside it. Frances saw a poorly printed label: Dr Ridley’s Pills, for the Treatment of Female Irregularities.

  She could hardly believe that such a thing was for sale in a West-End chemist’s, in 1922. It looked like something that belonged in a museum of medical curiosities alongside a two-headed baby and a leech jar. The pills themselves, she discovered when Lilian discreetly exposed them, were hard and fibrous, and smelt pungent, like a bad sort of mint. ‘But they have to make them nasty,’ reasoned Lilian, ‘don’t they? Otherwise nobody’d believe that they do any good.’

  All in the cover of her open handbag, she tipped one of the pills into her gloved palm and gazed at it with distaste. Then she made to lift it to her lips.

  Frances, aghast, caught hold of her wrist. ‘You aren’t going to take one right now?’

  She said, ‘I have to. You have to take some for three days, then all the rest on the fourth.’

  ‘No, don’t do it here. Not here, not yet.’

  It was altogether too real, there, with a tooting taxi-cab going by, and ordinary red and white motor-buses snorting their way up and down Oxford Street.

  But Lilian still had the pill in her palm. ‘I have to, Frances,’ she said again. And while Frances watched, she tightened her lips and sucked in her cheeks, working up the saliva in her mouth; then she popped the evil-looking pill on to her tongue and, with a grimace, quickly swallowed.

  Frances kept her eyes on her face. ‘How do you feel?’

  She took a breath. ‘I feel better for having started. But nothing will happen for ages yet.’ She folded the buff packet and tucked it deep down in her bag. ‘I’ll take another one before I go to bed tonight, and another when I get up; and if we’re lucky, maybe something will happen tomorrow.’

  She said the same thing the next morning, and all through the whole of that day. She remained confident, calm; it was Frances who was anxious, scrutinising her face whenever the two of them were together, looking for signs of illness in it, and, when they had to be apart, hovering at the foot of the stairs, listening out for anything odd. ‘How funny you are,’ Lilian said. ‘You’re worse than a man. If you were a wife, you’d know it was nothing. How do you think other women do it?’

  ‘I don’t care about other women. I care only about you. Suppose you should faint, or —’

  ‘I won’t faint. I didn’t last time. Ju
st be patient.’

  That was on the Wednesday evening, before Leonard returned from work. And the following morning she came to Frances looking pale but excited. Something was happening, she said. She had an ache, low down in her hips. Her bowels were looser than they ought to be, and, in wiping herself in the lavatory, she’d discovered a ‘show’. The only worry now was that it might come out too soon, in which case Leonard might be home when it happened, and she’d have to explain it to him as either a heavy kind of ordinary monthly, or an actual miss… Frances held her hands and kissed her; at the same time, she was shrinking away. She couldn’t believe that in the space of a day or two her life had taken such a swerve, undergone such a narrowing, become this morbid stalking of Lilian’s insides, this monitoring of blood and bowels.

  But by late afternoon, Lilian’s manner was less sure. The ‘show’ had dried up, the ache had diminished, and she had begun to feel queasy. In the middle of chopping meat for Len’s dinner she’d had to rush to the sink and retch; she couldn’t remember that from last time. She wanted to try a hot bath. But the bath would have to be almost scalding, she said, to do any good, and Frances’s mother was at home; they dared not risk being seen heating up kettles of water. They sat together in her sitting-room and she fidgeted, her hand at her stomach.

  ‘Isn’t it awful to think of that little egg inside me, doing its best to stay in there while I’m doing everything I can to get it out? Come on, little egg.’ She was willing it out of her womb. ‘You don’t want to stay in me. I’d be a bad, bad mother. Fly away to someone else. Fly away to some poor woman who wants a baby and can’t have one. Fly away! Now!’

  She raised her arm on the final word, making a fist of her hand; and then she thumped herself, hard, in the belly.

  Frances flinched. ‘God! Don’t.’

  She did it again, harder than before.

  ‘Don’t!’ said Frances. ‘Please! I can’t bear it!’

  ‘Well, I’ve got to do something! I can’t just sit here. Oh, why won’t your mother go out? I’m sure a bath would do it, if it was only hot enough. Isn’t there somewhere you can take her?’