The Paying Guests

  She listened tensely again to the two or three witnesses who came next. One of them was Inspector Kemp, looking pink and pleased with himself, describing the stages of the inquiry, making it sound like a game of hopscotch, one square leading neatly to another with only a few small sideways jumps. She became aware that her head was aching. The court had a white glazed ceiling; the clear, cold light was hard on the eyes. And then, sounds were travelling oddly. There were regular scrapings of chairs, and coughs and rustles up in the gallery; clerks and policemen came and went, in creaking shoes, with slips of paper. What must the boy be making of it all? He had seemed to listen keenly at the start, but his expression had grown blanker as the witnesses had come and gone, and now he was leaning forward with his elbows on the high ledge in front of him, his chin in his hand. She remembered his chewing-gum, his sniggers. His suit today was the same cheap blue one that he had worn at the police court, but someone had found him a soberer neck-tie, and his hair was improbably neat. His face was pale but slightly fuller, less ratty, than she recalled. He must have been eating better in prison, she thought, than in his own home.

  As she watched him, he changed his pose, turned his head, and caught her eye. The blush rose in her like sickness, sour and unstoppable.

  And then suddenly the inspector had stepped down from the stand; she was amazed to discover that half a day had passed, and the trial was adjourned for lunch. Lunch! It seemed too commonplace and casual a thing to think about, but once the jury had filed away and the robed men had left the dais, and Spencer had disappeared back down through the floor of the dock, the room became loose and unfocused again. Uncertain of what else to do, she followed the Barber men out to the marble hall, to a waiting-area with padded benches; Uncle Ted opened a briefcase, produced a wax-paper parcel and a thermos flask, and there appeared before her an unlikely spread of fish-paste sandwiches and tea. She had no appetite whatsoever, and it was surely the worst possible insult to them to take their food, but she accepted a sandwich at last, since they pressed her to. They discussed the progress of the trial, in grim, subdued voices. Douglas, fuming as usual, wanted to know what that fairy Tresillian thought he was playing at. He supposed there were men who’d defend anyone if there was a fee in it for them…

  Frances’s headache had expanded into a settled dull throb. The dry little triangle of bread and paste stuck to the roof of her mouth. She wondered what the boy was being given for lunch, and whether he had any more heart for it than she had. She wished she knew where Lilian was; she thought of going in search of her. But what would she say to her if she found her? Half a day gone already; all this grandeur, all these clever men; and it was all as hopeless as ever. After a while she made an excuse, and rose, and wandered down the overdecorated hall. But the walk took her to another set of padded benches, with a lot of unhappy-looking people on them, also nibbling at sandwiches. She realised that the people had come from another court, with another trial going on in it, with its own judge, its own jury, its own clerks and barristers; and that there was another court beyond that. And she had a vision of the building with its veined marble walls as a sort of stone monster into which crimes, guilts, griefs were continually being fed, in which they were even now being digested, and from which all too soon they would be revoltingly expelled.

  She looked back to see Leonard’s father signalling to her. It was time to return to the courtroom for the afternoon session. She followed him in; they settled themselves, and the remorseless digestion continued. Again, for a while, the witnesses were ones that she had seen before: the boys who’d heard Spencer making threats against Leonard, the couple from the lane. Then Charlie Wismuth’s name was called, and to her bewilderment he came in limping, with his arm in a sling and bruises on his face. Douglas saw her staring, and leaned to whisper to her, his lip curled in a horrible mixture of disgust and relish. Hadn’t she heard? Charlie’d got a pasting from the husband of that woman he’d been carrying on with! The man was heading for prison himself; he’d been up before the magistrate the week before… The thought of that, and the sight of the injuries, made Frances’s spirits droop further. And, of course, the details that came now were all the miserable ones about Leonard’s affair, the walks with the girls in the Green Park, the gifts, the spat at the Honey Bee night-club, the Tulse Hill meetings, the ‘particular traces’ —

  ‘We need not go further than that, I think,’ interrupted the judge, ‘since there are women present.’

  And the next name called was Lilian’s. There had been whispers up in the gallery as Charlie had given his evidence, but the room fell silent for her: she was one of the star turns, after all. Frances grew nervous as soon as she saw her, recalling the trembling figure she had cut at the inquest. But she climbed calmly into the witness-box, and stood with her veiled head high, and took her oath, and answered the counsels’ questions, in a voice that was low but quite steady… And that was worse than anything. It made Frances hardly able to look at her. For she knew that her calm came partly from courage, but more from a devastating indifference to what might happen to her now; that she had withstood so many horrors since the night of Leonard’s death that she had become stripped and smooth and colourless, like a tree in a hurricane, like a stone in a pounding sea.

  She was asked about her husband’s final day. No, he had not seemed nervous when he had left for work that morning. No, he had never done or said anything to make her think he feared for his safety. She had known nothing of his friendship with Miss Grey. She had known nothing of Spencer Ward. Yes, she remembered the evening of the first of July, when her husband had been assaulted.

  Would she mind just describing that first injury?

  He had been hit in the face, and his nose had bled.

  It had bled badly?

  Yes, she supposed so.

  Had they discussed sending for a doctor?

  That was the only time she hesitated and let her gaze fall. Yes, they had discussed sending for a doctor, she said, but had decided against it.

  She didn’t once look in Frances’s direction as she spoke. But when she stepped down from the stand she murmured for a moment with the usher, and instead of leaving the courtroom as most of the other witnesses had done she came across it, to join the Barber men and Frances on their bench. She had to pass in front of the dock to do it, and Spencer stared dully at her as she went by, but there was an almost audible stretching of necks in the gallery as the spectators up there tried to follow her with their gazes; even the stolid court officials, the clerks and policemen, watched her go. She seated herself beside Leonard’s father, who put up a hand to pat her shoulder. Frances saw a small shudder pass through her at his touch.

  And already something else had grabbed the attention of the room. A name had been called, and Frances had missed it. She heard the door to the court creak open, and then a slim female figure appeared. Only when the figure had entered the box, and she saw a curl of bottle-blonded hair, a pair of thinned eyebrows, did she recognise Billie Grey.

  Because she had come so soon after Lilian, all that was apparent for the first few minutes was what a contrast the two of them made. She had dressed, it seemed, with no thought for the solemnity of the occasion, but might have been on her way to a tea-dance, in a coat of powder blue, and a close-fitting hat of pink velvet with an ostrich feather curling at the side; her cream suede gloves had scarlet beads on them that rivalled the robes of the judge. She blinked up at the gallery, and all around the court, with what Frances guessed to be a touch of short-sightedness. She didn’t seem to notice Lilian – but she saw Spencer all right; she drew her gaze back from his as if frightened. She stumbled slightly over the oath, then tittered at herself. She continued to titter as she gave her evidence, though Mr Ives guided her as patiently as he might have done a child: ‘Now, is that quite your recollection?’ ‘Just think about that remark for me, would you?’ But all he wanted was for her to confirm the statements she had made to the police regarding her relationship wi
th Leonard, and the incident at the night-club, and Spencer’s rages and threats. Yes, she recalled very clearly that remark he had made about Mr Barber having been ‘owed a wallop’.

  And what about that ‘falling out’ she’d had with him earlier in the summer. Could she remind the jury how that altercation had ended?

  With another apprehensive glance at the dock, she said it had ended with Spencer striking her face and knocking out one of her back teeth. And when the boy huffed or muttered at the comment she spoke across the court to him directly – and Frances was startled to find that her tone was not fearful after all, but was chiding and faintly exasperated. ‘Well, you did do it, Spence.’

  At once, she was rebuked by the judge. ‘You must not engage in conversation with the prisoner.’

  ‘Well, he did do it,’ she said again – with stubbornness, this time.

  And whether the stubbornness was responsible, or – Frances wasn’t sure what it was. But for all that the girl, at first, had appeared so bewilderingly different from Lilian, the longer she stood there, gaining in confidence, the less unlike her she seemed to grow. She had the same wide, guileless face. Her eyes were dark and alive. Her mouth was full, though she had tried to make it fashionably smaller. Even the beads on her gloves and the feather on her hat recalled Lilian. She might just, Frances thought, have been Lilian at eighteen, Lilian unmarked by the hurried marriage, the still-born baby, the disappointments; Lilian, perhaps, as Leonard had first glimpsed her through the Walworth Road window.

  Could Lilian herself see it? It was impossible to say. She was watching the girl in the level, lifeless way in which she did everything now. It was Billie who was growing flustered – for Mr Ives had finished with her and Mr Tresillian had begun his cross-examination, and he was not kind and patient, as the other man had been; he was not like John Arthur; he was sarcastic and rather savage. He had every respect, he said, for Miss Grey’s lost tooth, and a gentleman could never be forgiven for lifting his hand against a lady. But there were surely people present who could sympathise with the dismay a young man might feel on discovering that his fiancée had been going about on intimate terms with another woman’s husband. Wasn’t it true that Miss Grey and Mr Ward had been engaged to be married?

  Billie widened her guileless eyes. Oh, no. That was just an idea that Spencer had got into his head.

  Wasn’t it true that she had accepted a ring from him?

  But he was always giving her presents; she couldn’t keep count of them. She wished he wouldn’t waste his money on her. They had been boy-and-girl friends, and she liked him well enough, but not in the way she’d liked Lenny – She blushed. ‘Mr Barber, I mean.’

  Mr Barber had made her presents, too, had he not?

  Well, he’d given her a few little things, ‘just to show his love by’.

  And she had known that Mr Barber was married, when she had accepted those ‘little things’?

  Yes, she’d known he was married. He had never been anything but straight with her about it. But his marriage wasn’t a proper one. There was no heart in it. It was all kept up for the look of the thing. – Lilian’s expression remained level at that, though once again people right across the court craned for a glimpse of her. No, Billie had never felt ashamed of herself. Lenny – Mr Barber – had said that life was too short for shame.

  Too short for shame, echoed Mr Tresillian, heavily. Well, Mr Barber’s life had certainly proved to be a short one. As for shame – it was up to the jury to decide where precisely the shame lay, in this case. He wanted to remind them, however, that they were in a court of law; they might just, in the past few minutes, have been forgiven for supposing that they had strayed into a picture-theatre and had been watching the antics of characters in a so-called romance. Miss Grey had spoken of love, but wasn’t it true that her friendship with Mr Barber had in fact been of the most squalid kind imaginable? A thing of furtive meetings in parks and rented rooms?

  The girl stared at him. No, it hadn’t been like that. That was making it out to be something common, but she and Lenny – They had been in love. They had used to talk and talk to each other. He’d told her all about when he was a boy and things like that. It hadn’t been their fault that the world was against them. They had been like Adam and Eve.

  And here, horribly, there was a snort of laughter in the public gallery; and the girl blinked up at the faces again, and her mouth gave a twitch, and she began to cry. That produced a boo from someone. Frances didn’t know if the boo was aimed at Billie herself or at the person who had laughed at her, but she cried harder at the sound, and the tears – real, grown-up, painful – quickly transformed her face into a swollen mask of grief. The usher handed her a glass of water, doing it in the neutral, professional way in which he might have retrieved a sheet of paper that had glided to the floor. Mr Tresillian waited, unmoved and unimpressed. The only figure visibly agitated by her upset was the boy in the dock: he was leaning forward, urgently trying to pass something to the nearest clerk. Frances, seeing the small square whiteness of it, thought at first that it was a note. Then she realised that it was a handkerchief that he had fished from his pocket; he wanted it carried to the witness-box for the girl to wipe her eyes with. The clerk took it, looking uncertain, but the judge saw, and waved him back.

  ‘No, no. There must be no communications from the prisoner. Mr Tresillian, I don’t see that this sort of display is assisting matters at all. Do you mean it to continue?’

  Mr Tresillian said, while the girl wept on, ‘It’s a question of reliability, my lord. Miss Grey has made some damaging allegations against my client. I have been trying to establish her character for the jury.’

  The judge spoke with distaste. ‘Yes, well, it seems to me that you have established it all too plainly. If there are no further questions from you or from Mr Ives, you might ask the wretched young woman to step down, I think.’

  The two men consulted for a moment, and Billie was gestured from the stand. The usher had to catch hold of her arm in order to help her out of the courtroom; she was sobbing worse than ever.

  From his place beside Frances, Douglas watched her go with another curl of his lip. ‘Go on, clear off, you little tart,’ he muttered.

  Soon after that, the court was adjourned for the day. Frances and Lilian made the journey back to Walworth in silence.

  The second morning was easier only in the sense that they knew now what to expect from it. Again Frances presented herself like a hapless suitor at Mrs Viney’s; again Lilian received her in her veil and beetly coat. They even had the same taxi-driver that they had had the day before. For all Frances knew, the crowd outside the Old Bailey might have been the same crowd, too. But, anyhow, they went through it less flinchingly this time, entered the building without a blink, found ‘their’ bench in the courtroom: she felt quite like an old hand. By the time the robed men were back on the dais and Spencer had done his conjuring trick in the dock, there might never have been a pause in the proceedings at all. The only difference was in the weather, which was wet and very grey: the rain came drumming on to the glazed roof to blunt the harsh light of the room, but make it harder than ever to hear.

  But was it even worth straining one’s ears to listen? The damaging evidence continued. A clerk from the Pearl, for example, was called to confirm that Leonard had extended his life assurance policy in July. And wasn’t that, mused Mr Ives, rather a curious thing for him to have done? A man in the very pink of health, perhaps in hopes of starting a family, who might have been expected, not to increase his premiums, but to save his money? Could the clerk think of any reason why Mr Barber would have done that, unless he’d had in mind the wife he had wronged, and her future as his widow? Unless, in other words, he had been in real and serious fear of his life?

  It was the point, Frances remembered, that Lilian herself had made: she saw the jurymen whispering together; she saw that shrewd shopkeeper making notes, as if totting up a bill. If only they could be brought to apprec
iate the tangle of it all! But no one was interested in tangles here. And though Mr Tresillian rose to protest to the judge against Mr Ives’s question – they had not gathered, he said, to hear the speculations of witnesses – the discussion that followed was like an elaborate sport between the three well-bred men, with little to do with the boy who sat gazing blankly on at it from the dock.

  By the time the case for the defence had been opened, and Spencer himself had been called as a witness, and Frances had watched him cross the court, and enter the stand, and make his first, stumbling responses to Mr Tresillian’s easy, leading questions, she had begun to be frightened again. All this time, she had imagined herself to be entirely without hope, but she had had hope, she realised: it had all been pinned on this moment, when at last, after so many weeks, the boy would have the chance to put his own case, clear up every scrap of confusion. But how could he possibly do it? How could anyone have done it, in that crushing, unnatural place, with so many greedy eyes on them, and with everyone present save herself and Lilian convinced of their guilt? He repeated the statement he had made at the start, that on the evening of Leonard’s death he had gone home from work with a headache and spent the evening with his mother. The tale sounded stilted – but of course it did. He must have told it a thousand times. He couldn’t remember having said that Mr Barber had been owed a wallop, but he supposed he must have said it, if Billie said he had. But there was a difference between saying a thing and doing it, wasn’t there? It was like going about with that cosh in his pocket. There was a difference between carrying something and using it. If there was blood on the cosh, that had come from rats and black-beetles. He’d never used it on Leonard Barber. Yes, he had given him a smack in the face that time in the summer, but that had only been to scare him off from messing about with Billie.