The Paying Guests

  The prosecuting counsel was altogether more impressive. He went smoothly over the facts as put together by Inspector Kemp, then summoned a series of witnesses to the stand. The first was one of the boys who claimed to have heard Spencer making threats against Leonard’s life. He kept looking at Spencer as he spoke, in a sly, gloating way: it was so patent that he had come to settle some sort of score that Frances’s spirits rose slightly. No one could possibly consider him a credible witness, she thought. But after him came the Camberwell servant who had been in the lane with her sweetheart on the night of Leonard’s death; and as she began to answer the prosecutor’s questions, Frances’s confidence shrivelled. Now that the girl was in front of her, real, solid, fattish-faced, it was more horrible than ever to think that she had been there in that stretch of impenetrable darkness with Lilian and herself, breathing the same flannelly air. The prosecutor wanted to know what precisely she had heard. She repeated what she’d stated to the papers: there had been footsteps and sighs, along with a cry of ‘No!’ or ‘Don’t!’ – that could only, thought Frances, unnerved, have been the cry that she herself had given when Lilian had touched her arm. Could the girl describe the voice? It had been ‘high’, she said, so high that just at first she’d mistook it for a woman’s. Frances began to sweat. ‘Then I saw about the murder, and —’

  ‘You decided, on reflection, that the voice was a man’s? Perhaps made high or light by fear?’

  ‘Oh, yes, it was awful fearful. I should hate to have to hear it again. Oh, it made your blood run cold!’

  It was obvious that she believed every word she was saying, and the simplicity and sincerity of her manner impressed the room. Leonard’s father was hunched up with his hand across his eyes; Douglas was patting his shoulder – and Frances could see that their distress was impressing people, too.

  Then the prosecutor called on the police surgeon, Mr Palmer, to report on the findings of the Home Office laboratory. He spoke first about those hairs that had been taken from Leonard’s coat: they were a ‘fair’ match with the head of the accused, he said; but no more than fair. He wouldn’t care to stake his reputation on them. The traces of blood that had been found on the cosh, however, were ‘almost certainly human’. The laboratory couldn’t be more precise than that, but he had seen the slides himself and, in his opinion as well as theirs – yes, almost certainly. The shape of the weapon was also a reasonable fit with the shape of the wound on Mr Barber’s head.

  Could he say with what degree of violence the blow to the head had been delivered? – Oh, a great degree of violence.

  It wasn’t a casual blow? A glancing blow? It couldn’t have been delivered accidentally? It couldn’t have been made in self-defence?

  Mr Palmer almost smiled. ‘Oh, no. I shouldn’t think that likely, given that the wound was slightly to the rear of Mr Barber’s head. As for the intention – If I might have the instrument for a moment, please?’ A constable took it to him, and he held it up as Inspector Kemp had held it up at the first hearing. ‘A short weapon like this, you see,’ he went on, pushing his cuff back from his wrist, ‘can have no momentum of its own. The momentum comes all from the arm.’ He swung his own arm, two or three times, to demonstrate the action. ‘With a longer object – a mallet, a poker, something like that – then, yes, I would certainly suggest that the force of the blow might be greater than the assailant had anticipated. An inexperienced assailant, that is. But with this sort of thing – no. The person who made that injury to Mr Barber’s head, with this particular weapon, would have known precisely what he was doing.’

  ‘He would have intended his blow to be fatal?’

  ‘He must have expected that result.’

  Frances couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The thing had taken on a life of its own. The surgeon, the lawyers, the police – they were all working backwards from their own idea of what had happened to Leonard and tailoring everything else to fit. There was no logic to it. Why couldn’t anyone else see? If she and Lilian were to stand up now and say what had really happened, the trial would fall to bits. If they could only bring themselves to do it! Wouldn’t it be easier than sitting here, listening to the facts being mangled? If they could only tell the truth, calmly – if they could just lead Inspector Kemp back to Champion Hill; if they just could show him the ashtray – he might be brought to believe, now, that it was all an accident. The surgeon had as good as said so, hadn’t he?

  But even as she raised her hands to the back of the pew in front of her, all the power in her muscles seemed to begin to drain away. She had to lean forward for a moment, close her eyes, fight off her own fear… And in that moment the trial moved on, and she did nothing. Mr Strickland requested more time in which to pursue his client’s defence. With every respect to Mr Palmer, he wished to consult another surgeon. He hoped that the medical evidence might be put at his disposal.

  The magistrate ordered that the hearing be adjourned. Spencer Ward was to be returned to Brixton for another seven days.

  And that was how it went on – exactly like that, not just for one week but for two, with, incredibly, no advance, no resolution; with Frances every time preparing herself for the worst, then receiving that sickening reprieve; with the boy being dispatched back to prison – until she began to feel as though they’d all slipped into some nightmarish other life, some hell or purgatory from which they would never get free.

  The complications of it all were beyond unpicking. Leonard’s father, for example: he seemed to be ageing before her eyes. Could she and Lilian really allow him to sit through another hearing, keep seeing that cosh displayed, imagine his son being pursued and beaten and left to die in a lane? Spencer’s mother was the same: she looked more faded by the week. But then, Frances’s own mother was looking older, too. What would a confession do to her? What would she think of the fact that Frances and Lilian had waited so long to make it? They ought to have spoken out at once; Frances saw that now. It was the two dark paths all over again and, just like last time, she had chosen the wrong one. It was too late to turn back. September gave way to October; the fourth hearing came and went. Already the boy had been in prison nearly a month. It was terrible, it was horrible. But at what precise moment should she and Lilian present themselves to the police? At what point did his safety start to outweigh theirs? While there was still a chance that the case would come to nothing, they had to keep on with it – didn’t they?

  Yes, said Lilian, they had to keep on with it.

  ‘But suppose it goes to the Old Bailey?’ said Frances. ‘He’ll be on trial for his life, then. His life.’

  Lilian paled. ‘But you said it wouldn’t.’

  ‘I thought it wouldn’t. Now – I don’t know.’

  ‘You were sure it wouldn’t. You said —’

  ‘Well, how could I possibly have been sure? It was you that wanted to wait!’

  They’d begun to go on like this when they met – arguing in whispers, in the Vineys’ parlour, or Vera’s bedroom, or down in the badly lighted passage behind the Walworth Road door. Or else they sat in a dead silence, struggling and failing to break it. Their plans for the future, the art classes, the bread and scrape: where had it gone? Frances thought of that room they’d used to dream about. She’d seen herself closing the door of it, turning a key against the world. They were in a room now, certainly: the room of their poisonous secret. It might be a prison cell already! Sometimes she raged. Sometimes she could have wept. Sometimes they clung together before they parted, and it was almost all right. But, ‘Do you love me?’ Lilian asked once, with a note of yearning in her voice, and the question was as jarring as if it had been asked by Vera or Min. Frances drew her close and kissed her; but she did it mainly to hide her own face.

  She went home that day so dejected, she wondered if their passion had ever been real. The house when she went into it clamoured drably for her attention. Rent-days had come and gone; she and her mother were slipping back towards debt. She made herself go into
Lilian’s sitting-room. The stains on the carpet seemed vivid again. But the stains didn’t matter now, of course, she had to remind herself. Even the ashtray didn’t matter. Her eyes went instead to the birdcage, the tambourine. She could see nothing but a lot of old junk. The china caravan was still on the mantelpiece: she picked it up and was amazed by how light it was. Turning it over she saw that it was hollow, with a hole in the bottom; somehow she hadn’t realised that. She held it in her hand, and remembered Lilian dipping her mouth to it, and, for a second, desire stirred in her, like a flame brought to life by a breath on a cinder. Then she thought of Leonard in his coffin, Spencer in his prison cell, and felt a rush of shame and embarrassment so acute she was almost sick.

  That night she dreamt she was pushing Leonard’s body through crowded streets in a thing like Violet’s doll’s pram, with only a little doll’s blanket to cover it. She kept pulling the blanket over his head, only to put his sprawled legs on display; kept twitching the blanket down again, exposing his bloated purplish face. She awoke in a sweat in the dark early morning, but what remained with her was not the horror of Leonard’s body in the pram so much as the loneliness of the dream – for she had been utterly on her own in it, the burden of the crime entirely hers. Where was Lilian? Lilian had left her! She felt like a child, abandoned. She had given her heart to Lilian and Lilian had given her nothing in return save half-truths, evasions, prevarications, lies.

  Then, from nowhere, there came a whisper: Five hundred pounds… The fact was, the swing of that ashtray had made Lilian a wealthy woman. The fact was, Lilian had done rather nicely out of the whole affair. She had rid herself of an unwanted child. She had rid herself of an unwanted husband. She had pinned the blame on an innocent boy —

  And I helped her with every stage of it, thought Frances in a panic. I even carted Leonard’s body down the stairs for her!

  She lay there in the darkness, turning it over in her mind. She could recollect times – she was sure she could – when Lilian had wished Leonard dead. Oh, why can’t some nice fat bus just run him over! Oh, if only he would just die! She forgot that there were times when she had wished him dead herself.

  Then, with a dreadful jolt, she thought of the letter that Lilian had once written her. Didn’t that letter have something in it? Some desire, some plea?

  She lit a candle, got out of bed, went shivering across to her chest of drawers to fish out the box in which, sentimentally, she kept the tokens of their love affair. There they all were, the silk forget-me-nots, the slips of paper with the kisses and the hearts: they looked childish, grotesque. Right at the bottom was the letter. She took it out of its envelope. What a scrap it was, after all! Mawkish and badly written. She found the lines she had remembered. If it isnt then tell me & make me believe it because I feel right now that I am ready to do any desperate thing to be with you – Her heart leapt into her throat. I am ready to do any desperate thing… Lilian had written those words after finding those tickets in Leonard’s pocket, in the knowledge that she had started a baby by him. Had she written them in spite? Had she written them in calculation? Had she planned the whole thing, even then?

  But then, Frances asked herself, how do I know for sure that the baby was even Leonard’s? Leonard had doubted it, hadn’t he? Maybe he’d been right! Lilian was unfaithful to him; why shouldn’t she also have been unfaithful to me? She looked again at the letter – and this time a different line caught her eye. You said I like to be admired… You said I would love anybody who admired me… Now her mind ran over those admirers of Lilian’s, the lady-killer in the park, the men in trains lowering their newspapers for a better look at her. She remembered the cousins she had danced with so freely at Netta’s party. She remembered curly-haired Ewart. ‘If she was my wife, I’d smack her behind.’ So, even he had seen it! There must be something about Lilian – mustn’t there? There must be something instinctual, something almost morbid, something like an unhealthy perfume, that drew those men, those boys? Drew Frances herself?

  In a sort of fever now, she took the letter and the box over to the hearth, tipped it all into the grate and put a match to it. She couldn’t have things like that in the house! Suppose the police should find them! She watched the papers being eaten by the flame and, for a moment, grew calmer. Then her mind began racing again. What else was there to incriminate her? The china caravan, next door? She thought seriously of fetching it and smashing it up. Then she remembered the half-button that she had found in the kitchen passage, that might or might not have been pulled from Leonard’s cuff. She had pushed it into the earth of the aspidistra plant. That was a crazy thing to have done! She ought to have taken the button away from the house – right away somewhere. She ought to have dropped it into the Thames! If the police should come —!

  The police wouldn’t come, so long as Spencer Ward was in prison. But she had got to a point almost of madness now. It seemed to her quite possible that Lilian might go to Inspector Kemp and tell him some sort of tale against her. She might have gone to him already. He might be on his way to the house. Didn’t they come in the early morning? Wasn’t that how they did it?

  It was ten to six, and pitch dark. She was shivering right through. But she put on her dressing-gown and slippers, picked up her candle, stole downstairs, and – quietly, quietly, thinking of her mother, asleep near by – she lifted the aspidistra from its spot beside the dinner-gong and carried it out to the kitchen table. It was trickier than she’d expected to get hold of the button. She couldn’t reach it with the blade of a knife; she had to tip the pot, scrabble in the earth with her fingers. The dusty leaves got into her face, sharp and hard against her eyes. The earth began to spill, but she kept on digging, growing more and more anxious, feeling more and more desperate – until the pot fell noisily sideways and the plant came free, a mass of dirt and writhing white roots. The button came tumbling out along with everything else: just a black half-button it was, like a thousand others in the house, probably not from Leonard at all. The sight of it broke the spell of her insanity; she covered her face and started to cry.

  When she looked up a few minutes later, her mother was there, gazing at her from the kitchen doorway. ‘Frances, good heavens! What on earth’s the matter?’

  Frances shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said, as she sobbed and sobbed into her dirty fingers. ‘Nothing.’

  She spent that day in bed. Her mother brought her tea and aspirin, along with ill-cooked little meals: rubbery buttered eggs, collapsed potatoes. After lunch there was a tap at the bedroom door and in came the family physician, an elderly man named Dr Lawrence. Her mother must have sent one of the tradesmen’s boys to him with a note. He took her blood-pressure, and listened to her heart, and felt beneath her jaw with his warm, dry fingers. ‘Any giddiness?’ he asked her. ‘Fainting spells? Shortness of breath?’ She shook her head at every question, embarrassed about her tattered nightgown, worried about how much his visit was costing. But his manner was so mild, so unsuspecting, that her eyes filled with tears. He patted her hand, then spoke quietly to her mother out on the landing. ‘Nerve strain’ was his conclusion, perhaps a delayed response to the War, and to the deaths in the family, all aggravated by recent upsets. Frances must rest, avoid excitements… He left her a jar of tabloids to be taken at bedtime.

  She lay and thought of her father, of her father’s ‘heart attacks’. She thought of the terrors that must have seized him over his failing fortune, his lost sons, his cross-grained, unmarriageable daughter; and she wept again.

  For two or three days after that she gave herself over to the idea of invalidism. She didn’t dare venture out for the morning papers. Spencer Ward, for once, had to go un-thought-about, un-imagined; she couldn’t help it if the machinery sucked him in and crushed him. She kept to the sofa with worn old books from her childhood, Treasure Island and The Swiss Family Robinson. She took her tabloid at nine o’clock each night, and dropped straight into a dreamless sleep.

  And then, on a Sunda
y morning, when she was least expecting it – when she had given up hoping for it, and was no longer sure that she even wanted it to happen – Lilian returned.

  She had just cleared the breakfast table and was out in the scullery, washing up. When she heard the sound of a key going into the lock of the front door, she thought it was her mother, come back early from church. Puzzled, she called across the kitchen: ‘Is everything all right?’ There was no answer: only the tap, oddly uncertain, of heels on the floor.

  Her heart made an unpleasant movement in her chest. Shaking the suds from her fingers she went out into the passage – and there was Lilian, in her widow’s coat and hat, with a suitcase in her hand, looking nothing at all like the sinister scheming creature that madness had made of her; looking sheepish, like a visitor who had stayed out too long; looking thin, looking pale, but, apart from that, looking achingly familiar and dear… Frances’s step faltered. She was horribly conscious of her own appearance, her face still puffy from her drugged, unnatural sleep, her hair unwashed, her clothes at their drabbest. She blotted her hands on her apron. ‘You ought to have let me know you were coming. I could have got myself ready for you.’

  Lilian’s face fell slightly. ‘You don’t have to get yourself ready for me, do you?’

  ‘Got the house ready, then.’

  ‘Oh, but – No, it’s all right.’ Frances had come forward to take the suitcase from her. She swung and raised it, awkwardly; it struck Frances’s elbow with a hollow sound, and Frances realised that it was empty. She looked at Lilian, not understanding. But Lilian was blushing now. ‘I can’t keep borrowing Vera’s things,’ she said. ‘I – I’ve come to get some more clothes to take back to Walworth.’

  So she hadn’t come back to stay… Frances felt a rush of the abandonment that had overwhelmed her a few nights before. The feeling was like a wailing infant suddenly thrust into her arms: she didn’t want it, couldn’t calm it, had nowhere to set it down. Without a word, she turned away, went out to the kitchen to remove her apron and wash her hands.