The Paying Guests

  Still keeping the cushion in place, she patted him. ‘Leonard. Leonard!’ She wanted to get some response from him, something ordinary and undreadful.

  ‘Oh, make him wake up!’ wailed Lilian. She’d begun, in fear, to weep again.

  Frances shook his shoulder. ‘Leonard. Len. Can you hear me?’

  But she couldn’t rouse him. When she shook him more roughly, it simply jolted a thicker sort of spittle from his mouth. The horrible breaths went on and on. She looked at Lilian. ‘What on earth were you thinking?’

  Lilian was shaking like a hare. ‘I wasn’t thinking anything! I was just trying to get him to stop. He was throttling you, wasn’t he? I tried hitting him with my hands and it didn’t do any good.’

  ‘But why did you pick up the ashtray?’

  ‘I don’t know! There was nothing else.’

  ‘But to hit him on the head, Lilian!’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I swear. I just swung it. I didn’t mean —’ She gazed down at her quivering hands, then pulled at her sleeve, showing Frances. ‘Look!’ The sleeve had a long streak of ash on it. ‘I knew I oughtn’t to hit him with the ashy end, you see, in case it dirtied his coat. That shows I didn’t mean to hurt him, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that show it?’ Her gaze returned to Leonard. ‘Oh, God, there’s so much blood! How can there be so much blood? And why won’t he wake up?’

  ‘He’s unconscious,’ said Frances. She still had the cushion pressed in place. She was frightened to lift it. She was frightened to move.

  ‘There’s so much blood,’ repeated Lilian. ‘It’s all over his clothes. It’s going to get everywhere. Oh, why does he sound like that? Why won’t he —’

  She stopped. Something had changed. Something new had happened to him. He had taken one of those atrocious breaths, but this time the air, as it came out of him, sounded different, was noisier, wetter. ‘Len?’ she said, leaning over him. Frances peered again into his face. The breath came on and on, bubbling around the point of his tongue. They saw his back and shoulders sinking, and watched for them to rise again. But they did not rise. The bubbling ceased, and gave way to a terrible silence.

  ‘Len?’ repeated Lilian, less certainly than before.

  Frances pushed her out of the way. Leaving the cushion sitting in place, she drew back the bunched-up collar of his coat and felt at his neck for a pulse. His flesh was hot and sweaty and seemed full of life, but she could find no beat of blood in it. She laid her ear against his overcoated back, moving about from one spot to another; again, the heat was streaming from him, but she heard no heartbeat save her own terrified one. She caught sight of Lilian’s powder-compact in the mess of things on the floor. She ran and got it, and unclasped it, and held its mirror to his misshapen mouth. She held it for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty; it remained unmisted.

  She couldn’t believe it. Still keeping the cushion clamped to his head, she heaved him over on to his back. A single, breathy groan came out of him, that made Lilian scuttle close to him and call his name again. But the groan was oddly inanimate, like the gust of air that might rise from the neck of a thrown-down bag, and his limbs lay where they had landed, as if not quite connected to the rest of him. Frances got hold of his arms and lifted them, and let them fall again. She tried pushing at his chest, at his stomach – anything to get air into his lungs. But even in the short space of time that she had spent attempting to rouse him it seemed to her that the surface of his partly open eyes, and of his lips and pink tongue, had lost some of their wetness. He’d become not a man, but something resembling a man, something bulky and empty and wrong.

  She sat back on her heels. The room still seemed to be ringing with his voice. She could still feel the grip of his hand in her armpit, the weight of his body against hers. But, ‘Lily,’ she said, in a whisper, ‘I think he’s dead. I think you’ve killed him.’

  Lilian stared as if not understanding. Then her face crumpled. ‘No! He can’t be! He just can’t! He’s fooling, to tease us!’ She went back to him, took hold of him. ‘Lenny! Wake up! Come on! It isn’t funny! Stop it, Lenny! You’re frightening me. You’re frightening Frances. We didn’t mean it, what we said before. It wasn’t true. We didn’t mean it. Please! Oh, please wake up!’

  But even as she begged, the urgency began to fade from her voice. She must have been struck, as Frances had been, by the transformation, the wrongness of him. ‘Please, oh, please,’ she kept saying; but the word became mechanical, meaningless. At last she fell silent, and took her hand from him, and looked at him in horror.

  Then she looked at Frances. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Frances was still catching her breath. There was blood on her fingers, sticky. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But he can’t – I didn’t – Oh, what will his mum and dad say!’ The thought sent her back to him in terror. ‘Oh, what have I done? I can’t believe it. He can’t be dead. He can’t be! You can’t die from something like that! Lenny, wake up! Oh, look at all the blood on his clothes! It can’t be true. He can’t be dead. He went through the War, Frances! Oh, why did he have to come home? And why did you have to tell him, about you and me? Oh, God, it’s like an awful dream!’

  Her voice was sliding from disbelief into something like hysteria. Frances went over to her and took her in her arms. They embraced as best they could, one of them squatting, the other kneeling, a yard or so from Leonard’s stuck-up, splayed-out feet. Lilian pressed her face to Frances’s shoulder and moaned and moaned. But the embrace was as wrong, somehow, as Leonard’s lifeless body. Their fingers clutched, but their fear was between them, dark, electric. Their hearts were pounding, but pounding separately, each to its own horrified rhythm.

  Frances couldn’t bear it. She broke free, turned away. Lilian was right: it couldn’t be true. She went back to Leonard’s body and tried again to revive him. There must be a way. There must be! He had lost all that blood, the yellow cushion was sodden with it; there were splashes of it all over the clutter of things on the carpet. But, even so, you couldn’t just die, not like that, not like this. And the wound itself, she saw, had ceased bleeding now. That could only be good – couldn’t it? A shock to his system might bring him round. A blow, a jolt. She saw a glass of water on the mantelpiece, and tried dashing a handful of it into his face. It mixed with the blood, that was all. She poured the rest of it into his mouth, moving aside his tongue to do it. But the water sat in there like water in a vase – horrible, horrible.

  Setting the glass down with a shaking hand, she looked at the clock: ten past nine. She tried to pull her thoughts together. She closed her eyes for what felt like a moment, then looked at the clock again and found that two whole minutes had gone by.

  She said, ‘We have to do something. I’ll have to get a doctor.’

  Lilian trembled. ‘A doctor?’

  ‘I think it’s too late for one, but – What else can we do?’

  ‘But what will we tell him?’

  ‘I don’t know. The truth, I suppose.’

  ‘That I hit him?’

  ‘What else can we say?’

  ‘But we can’t tell him that! He’ll send for the police, won’t he?’

  ‘I think – I think he’ll have to.’

  ‘No, Frances. No. Oh, it can’t be true! He can’t be dead! There has to be something we can do.’ And again she took hold of him – caught at his hand, this time. ‘Len! Lenny!’ She squeezed and patted it. ‘Stop it, Lenny! Please! Help me, Frances. There has to be a way.’

  She had hold of his other hand now. Now she was patting his thighs, his knees. The clock ticked on, unhurried but relentless. Frances tried to draw her back. ‘It’s no good. It’s no use.’

  She continued to pat him. Her eyes and cheeks were wet with tears. ‘It isn’t true.’

  ‘It is. You know it is, Lilian. Stop it. We have to do something real. The longer we leave it, the odder it’ll look. The odder, I mean, it’ll look to the police —’

  That made Lilian grow still. Gazin
g up at Frances, she spoke in a voice as small as a child’s.

  ‘You won’t say I hit him, will you?’

  Frances swallowed. ‘They’ll have my word as well as yours that you didn’t mean it.’

  ‘They’ll say it was murder. They’ll hang me, Frances!’

  ‘They won’t do that. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t!’ But Frances’s voice had begun to tremble. Her heart seemed to be squirming in her breast. It was almost twenty past nine now. Another ten minutes gone! She drew a couple of shaky breaths. ‘We just have to be clear about what happened. So long as we’re clear, it’ll be all right. Leonard was attacking me, after all. I must have bruises – do I?’ She pulled down her collar. ‘Am I marked, here?’

  Lilian looked at her throat without seeing it. ‘But they’ll want to know why we were fighting. They’ll find out about you and me. They’ll find out about the baby. I can’t go through with it, Frances. I can’t! There must be something we can do. Oh, I feel so ill, I think I’ll die! – No, Frances, wait!’ Frances had begun to move away. Lilian caught hold of her – her hand, her cuff. She was still on her knees. ‘There must be something, some other way. We’ve done so much to be together. They’ll keep us apart, I know they will. It isn’t fair! We’ve done so much!’

  Her grip had all her fear in it. Her face was greeny-white. ‘Please, Frances. Please. Can’t we say something – anything? Can’t we say that – that he fell?’ She seized on the idea, her grip growing tighter. ‘Can’t we say he just fell and hit his head? If we were to move him on to his side, put something underneath him —’

  ‘But, put what?’ Frances gazed around in frustration. ‘There’s no fender. There’s nothing hard in the room at all. There’s only a thousand fancy cushions! Look at the wound, at all that blood! The doctor would know we were lying. It would need a step or a stone to make a wound like that.’

  ‘Well, then, suppose he’d fallen outside? We could say he came in, that we tried to help him. You remember that time, when someone hit him? He got himself back to the house that time, didn’t he? He was bleeding, then. We could say he did that – that he came in, and told us he’d fallen, and then just – just died —’

  ‘Oh, Lilian, be rational. He couldn’t have got anywhere with a wound like this. They’d never believe it.’

  Lilian was wringing her fingers. ‘Well, say he’d never come home at all? Couldn’t we take him, lay him down somewhere?’

  ‘Take him out to the street? With people going by? How could we do that?’

  ‘But he didn’t come the street way. He came the garden way. Couldn’t we carry him out to the garden?’

  ‘You aren’t serious?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I am. I’m just so afraid! If we could only get him outside. They’d have to say it was an accident then, even if they weren’t sure. Couldn’t we take him right out of the garden? Right out to the back lane? Someone will find him. It won’t be like hiding him. It won’t be like that. Please, Frances. Please.’

  Christ, what a nightmare it was! What a worse-than-nightmare! Frances tugged her fingers free and put her hands to her face. What she could see were two paths, both of them dark, both of them terrible. To start down one of the paths she would have to run for the doctor, right now. He would look at Leonard’s body with its broken head, and then he would look at Lilian – Lilian like this, helpless and ill. There would be questions, tears, lies. Her mother would come home to a house in turmoil, to a policeman at the door —

  It was the thought of that, bizarrely, rather than anything to do with Lilian, that made her begin to waver towards the other path. She gazed down at Leonard’s body. She went over to peer at that sickening wound. Could it be passed off as an accident? If they were to lie him in a certain way, place something beneath his head? Could they do it? Could they?

  She said slowly, ‘We’d both have to carry him. I’d never manage it alone. You’d have to help me. Oh, this is madness! Even supposing – You haven’t the strength.’

  Lilian was wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘You’re too ill! God, I don’t know. I can’t think straight! And time’s going by.’ The minute hand had snuck forward again.

  ‘Can’t we just try?’ pleaded Lilian.

  Frances looked at her. ‘Do you really mean it?’

  But Lilian was already scrambling to her feet. ‘What will we need? Our shoes? What else? Tell me, Frances!’

  Frances didn’t know what to do. She put her ear to Leonard’s chest again, just in case, by some miracle, there was some sign, some beat or flutter that had escaped her before… There was nothing. Even the heat seemed to be leaving him now. And his face, with its lustreless slits of eyes and pink, protruding tongue, looked more inhuman than ever.

  She tried to think it all through. ‘We’ll have to keep the cushion against him. We’ll get blood everywhere, otherwise. We’ll have to bind it. Will that work? Oh, Christ, I don’t know! What can we use? One of his scarves? And I’ll need something to cover my clothes, an apron, or a towel, or —’

  Her hands at her belly, Lilian darted away.

  She seemed to return almost instantly, with her arms full of things. She dropped them on the floor at Frances’s feet: a gingham apron from the kitchen, a blue knitted scarf from the rack, a pair of dark shoes of her own, another pair, of Frances’s, that she had got from Frances’s bedroom. Frances stared at the tangle of it all in disbelief. Lilian picked up the apron and held it out to her.

  ‘Please, Frances. Let’s just try.’

  So, with a feeling of unreality, Frances tied the apron on, rolled back her sleeves, stepped into the shoes; then, shuddering, she squatted and took hold of Leonard’s head. It lolled in her hands, as heavy and uncontrolled as a cabbage in a string bag, and as she tilted it to fasten the cushion in place, the water that she had poured into his mouth came spilling out.

  At the same time, once his face was obscured by the scarf it was harder to believe that he was really dead. She got herself behind his shoulders and tried to ease him up from the floor, nervously certain that he was about to wriggle about, protest. But as soon as she’d worked her hands under his armpits and had heaved him a little way towards the door, she had to let him drop: he was as unwieldy as a sodden roll of carpet. She thought, That’s it. We can’t do it. The words came with a gush of relief. Then she saw the fright and the helplessness on Lilian’s greenish face… She gripped again, and this time, by getting her arms hooked further under his, so that his padded head rested bulkily against her chin and shoulder, she was able to lift him and begin to drag. When his feet pulled at the carpet Lilian caught hold of his ankles. They slipped from her fingers after two steps, and she caught instead at his trouser-cuffs.

  By the time they had staggered the few yards out to the landing and across to the top of the stairs, Frances was exhausted. And Leonard’s coat was dragging; she set him down and did up its buttons. Then her eye was caught by something dark on the newel post. His hat! They’d forgotten all about it! God, what else might they have forgotten? She reached across and picked it up: his City bowler, stained on the inside, sour and fragrant from the rub of his hair. But how could they carry it, as well as carrying him? The only way was to wear it herself. She began to raise the hat to her head, then looked at Lilian, and couldn’t do it. She couldn’t! It was all too much. It was madness!

  But they had moved Leonard this far. And it must be almost quarter to ten by now. If they moved him back, and unbound him, and she ran for the doctor, how would they explain the delay? How would they explain the fact that they had moved him at all? They should never have begun. They had made a mistake! Let’s just try, Lilian had said. But this wasn’t a thing, Frances realised now, that could be tried and then un-started. The panic rose in her again, that black, electric fear… And suddenly the only possible way to beat the fear off was to keep going. She put the hat on her head, and, gesturing for Lilian to be silent, she leaned over the banister,
listening. Suppose her mother had come home, unnoticed, some time in the past half-hour? And mightn’t neighbours or passers-by have heard the sounds of argument? But the windows were closed, and the street, so far as she could judge it, was still. She could hear nothing but the pulse of the gaslight, the tick of clocks.

  She nodded to Lilian, caught hold of Leonard again, and began to back her way down the stairs.

  It was terrifyingly different from crossing the level floor. She had to grope blindly with her foot for each step, taking more and more of the weight of the tilting body as she descended. Lilian, above her, struggling for footholds of her own, held on to Leonard’s trouser-cuffs for as long as she was able, but soon one and then the other slipped from her fingers; the force of his collapsing limbs sent Frances swaying backward and she cried out, imagining herself going tumbling down with the body coming heavily after her. Sweating, straining, she at last found her balance, and managed the rest of the descent without Lilian’s help, simply hauling Leonard down like a sack of potatoes, so that his feet bumped and bounced about on the stairs and against the banisters.

  At the bottom she let him sag completely to the floor and stood doubled over, panting after her breath. But she felt more exposed and anxious here, more impressed by the horrifying reality of it all. If her mother should walk in now —! The thought made her reach for Leonard again. Her arms, however, felt as though they’d been half torn from her shoulders, and her hands, for the moment, had lost their power to close. She plucked uselessly at his body, another wave of panic running through her. They couldn’t get him back up the stairs now, even if they wanted to!