The Paying Guests

  ‘I think you rather enjoy giving people smacks, don’t you, Mr Ward?’ said Mr Ives, when he rose to begin his cross-examination. ‘Did you enjoy knocking out Miss Grey’s tooth, back in June?’

  The boy’s narrow shoulders sank. ‘For God’s sake, I only tapped her to try and get some sense into her! Half the teeth in her head have fell out by themselves. She said I done her a favour, after it. She’s been putting money by for a set of uppers. She didn’t tell you that, did she?’

  ‘Did you enjoy going after Leonard Barber on the fifteenth of September?’

  ‘How could I have enjoyed it? I’ve already said, I never went near him!’

  ‘Did you enjoy pursuing him into that dark lane and striking him down, from behind, with your cosh?’

  The boy appealed to the judge, to Mr Tresillian, to the clerks, to anyone who would listen. ‘This is mad, all of this is. I never done it. I never done it! Some bloke’s going about right now laughing himself sick over all of this…’

  On and on it went, while Frances and Lilian sat and watched. It was like looking on at torture, Frances thought, knowing that with a word they could stop it; feeling the word wanting to come out, feeling it rise in her gullet, but swallowing and swallowing to choke it back down. For, of course, in saying the word they would simply have to take the boy’s place… By the time he had been released, they were limp and sweating. The court broke for lunch, and they let the Barbers go. ‘God! God!’ said Lilian softly. Her face shone white as a bone through the mesh of her veil.

  Then it all started up again. The boy’s railway-porter uncle offered a feeble character reference. A man who ran a Bermondsey boxing club said that Spencer had been ‘willing to learn’ and ‘quick to get the hang of the punching’ – there were more snorts of laughter up in the gallery at that. And then the mother, Mrs Ward, was called to the court. She went creeping into the stand, to answer the counsels’ questions in a voice so faint and uncertain it was like the cobwebby voice of a ghost; the judge had to lean forward out of his chair in order to catch it. She confirmed that the cosh on display was one she had seen in her son’s possession. He had killed any amount of vermin with it at home. But as for carrying it about the streets with him, it was her belief that he did that – well, as he might have carried a boy’s pistol. In fun, she meant.

  In fun, said Mr Ives. And on the night of the murder? Had Mr Ward been out having fun, then?

  Oh, no. It was all just how he’d told the police. He had come home from work that day with his head hurting; he had spent the evening indoors with her. No, they hadn’t had no visitors, but – well, she had seen him there with her own two eyes.

  Did he often suffer from headaches?

  Oh, yes, he had them quite regular. He’d had them since he was little.

  Could she refer the court to a doctor who might vouch for that?

  She looked thrown. ‘Well, he never saw the doctor, sir.’

  ‘He never did. That’s a pity. And how did he pass the evening, precisely?’

  ‘He was on his bed, sir.’

  ‘In his bedroom?’

  ‘He has his bed in the parlour, sir.’

  ‘I see. And what was he doing?’

  ‘He was reading his British Boy, sir.’

  Here Mr Ives paused, and the judge leaned further out of his chair, his hand cupping his ear. ‘What does the witness say?’

  ‘The witness was telling us, my lord, that on the night in question her son was reading a copy of the British Boy. I believe it’s a —’

  ‘Yes, I know what it is. My grandson reads it. Mrs Ward —’ Screwing up his face, the judge addressed the woman directly. ‘You are asking the court to believe that your son, a young man of nineteen years, used, as we have heard, to going about the town to night-clubs and dance-palaces, spent his Friday evening at home with you, reading a boy’s picture-paper?’

  She looked at him doubtfully, clearly sensing that there was a catch in his question; but just unable, Frances thought, to put her finger on what it was.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

  He sat back without comment. In the dock, Spencer hung his head. The jurymen whispered again, and Frances covered her eyes.

  And when she uncovered them, and saw the next witness, and understood that he was some Bermondsey neighbour, here perhaps to offer another lacklustre character reference, the futility of it all nearly overwhelmed her. The man had a yellowish, underfed cast to his features, and shiny patches on his ill-fitting suit. He looked like the sort of ex-service man who asked for money on the streets – as though he might swear to anything for the price of a meal. And, yes, Mr Tresillian’s first questions were all to establish his War record, the campaigns he had fought in, the wounds he had received. He had been demobilised in February ’nineteen, he said, and had had various addresses after that. But since March of this year he had been living in the same building as the accused and his mother. He had a single room there, that he rented from another family.

  ‘Now,’ said Mr Tresillian briskly, ‘to get one unpleasant detail out of the way first: have you ever seen rats and black-beetles in the building?’

  The man nodded. ‘You might say that. The place is crawling with them. The rats come up the drain-pipes. The beetles come out from behind the wallpapers at night.’

  ‘And what is the best way of dealing with them, in your experience?’

  ‘If you can catch them, you can give them a thump – say, with the heel of your shoe. Or with a heavy book, if you have one.’ He added, after the slightest of pauses, ‘A book like a Bible will do it.’

  The deliberate way in which he said this made Frances pay more attention to him. He wasn’t like a beggar on the street, after all. He was too truculent for that, or had been too ill-used, perhaps; he gave the impression of no longer caring whether he got the coin or not. Mr Tresillian asked what he was employed at. He said he’d had a number of situations since the Army had ‘dispensed with his services’: he had put the bristles on brooms in a factory, he had sold boot-laces door to door. Until very recently – here, inexplicably, he became almost sour – he had been a traveller for an electric light-bulb company.

  ‘A good position?’ suggested Mr Tresillian. ‘One you were keen to hold on to? And an occupation which, naturally, took you away from home now and then; but not to the extent of making you a stranger to your neighbours, nor of making them strangers to you… By which we come to the heart of the matter. Your room, I understand, faces, across a small courtyard, the rooms in which Mr Ward resides with his mother. You’re used to seeing them at their windows, going back and forth and so on?’

  Frances grew still. The man was nodding. ‘Yes, I see them more than I care to; especially the boy. In the summer just gone he used to think it a great sport to shoot things across at me – stones, and dried peas and what have you.’

  Mr Tresillian spoke rather hastily. ‘At any rate, you know him well?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And you remember the evening of the fifteenth of September? How did you spend that evening?’

  ‘I spent it at home.’

  ‘With your window-curtains open or closed?’

  ‘Not quite closed.’

  ‘Why was that? On a chill autumn evening?’

  ‘I find I want air, since the War. I’d rather be cold than stifled. I keep the window ajar, and the curtains parted, all year round.’

  ‘And did you look out of the window, that night?’

  ‘As I passed it, I did.’

  ‘You looked out of the window, as it might be, as a diversion, whilst stretching your legs? And what did you see?’

  He jerked his head at the dock. ‘I saw that boy over there, lying on his bed with his picture-paper.’

  Frances’s heart contracted so sharply that it might have been touched by the point of a blade. Beside her, Lilian drew a breath. There were murmurs across the court. Mr Tresillian waited for the murmurs to subside.

  ‘You’re quite su
re it was Mr Ward you saw?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t call him mister, myself – but, yes, it was him all right.’

  ‘There could be no mistake about it? No other curtain was in the way?’

  ‘No, there was no mistake. His mother has nothing but a scrap of lace up; you can see clean through it when the lamps are lit. He was lying there giving out the orders to her as he usually does. She was fetching him cups of tea and the like all evening long. And when she took herself off to bed at a quarter to eleven he was still there; and he called her out of her bed a half-hour later to fetch him a glass of water. I heard his voice, that time, clear across the courtyard.’

  Now the blade seemed to be pushing its way right into Frances’s heart. There were more murmurs, from the benches in front of her and from the spectators overhead. She couldn’t tell, however, if the murmurs were sceptical or impressed. She looked at Mr Ives, at the boy in the dock, at the jury, at the judge. The latter was sitting forward making notes, his face impassive.

  As before, Mr Tresillian paused to let the disturbance subside – and also, she thought, to choose his next words carefully. When he addressed the man again, his tone had grown delicate.

  ‘I am going to put a question to you now,’ he said, ‘because I know that if I do not, my learned friend Mr Ives will, quite correctly, put it to you himself. That boy over there has been in prison for many weeks. I imagine you read the newspapers. I imagine you talk to your neighbours. I imagine there have been police about, asking questions, all over your building. You must have known the bearing your evidence would have on this case. Why did you delay so long in volunteering it?’

  And, for the first time, the man looked uncomfortable. A touch of shiftiness entered his gaze. ‘Yes, I knew all about it,’ he said. ‘I was in two minds about going to the police, for reasons of my own.’

  ‘And those reasons were? Remember now, it is Mr Ward who is on trial here, not you. Remember, too, will you, that he is on trial for his life.’

  The man changed his pose, moved his weight from one foot to another; and answered grudgingly at last. ‘I was in fear for my position. My employers had supposed me in Leeds on the night of the fifteenth. It wasn’t in my interest to enlighten them.’

  ‘You had misrepresented your movements to them?’

  ‘I had claimed expenses that weren’t due me… It sounds shabby to admit it, here.’

  ‘It does sound shabby,’ said Mr Tresillian. ‘But, then, there can’t be a man in this room – saving, of course, his lordship on the bench – who hasn’t given way to a shabby impulse at one time or another. When was it that you approached the police with your statement?’

  ‘Last week, when I heard how black things had got for the boy. I’d had a month of looking out my window, seeing his poor mother – I couldn’t live with myself.’

  ‘And the police, I imagine, spoke with your employers?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘With what result?’

  ‘I was given my marching orders.’

  ‘Your position lost, your good name tarnished. Just what you had anticipated, in fact. And yet, you still felt it your duty to come forward?’

  The man looked sour again. ‘I did. I don’t like the boy. No one in our building does. I can’t speak for anything else he might have done or not done. He might want hanging ten times over for all I know about it. But as far as the murder of this Mr Barber goes, he doesn’t want hanging for that, for he was at home with his mother all that evening long, and nothing could make me tell you he wasn’t, though I should be hanged for it my —’

  Myself, Frances knew he was going to finish. But from the corner of her eye she had seen Douglas rise and lean forward, and now he shouted at the man in a fury: ‘Liar!’

  There were exclamations, protests. His father and uncle attempted to restrain him; he shook off their hands and shouted again, more hoarsely. ‘Liar!’ He spoke to the jury: ‘He’s been put up to this! He’s been paid to do it! Can’t you see?’

  The judge called sternly for him to be silent. Faces peered over the balcony, a woolly scarf dangled. Spencer looked on open-mouthed, showing all his dreadful teeth. A policeman came across the well of the court, and at his approach Douglas gave a snort of disgust but grew calmer and, with a flick of the tails of his overcoat, sat back down. And by the time the room had settled, Frances understood that the force of the man’s evidence had been dispelled. Mr Ives rose to cross-examine him, and he grew truculent again, and looked seedy and dishonest; his little moment of nobility, she realised, had come and gone. But they had to believe him, didn’t they? He had been brave. He had been brave where she and Lilian had been cowards. They had to believe him! She gazed from face to face, desperate to see some change in people’s expressions. But the faces remained closed to her. The mechanism of the trial had stuttered and jammed for a moment, but was already running smooth again.

  She couldn’t listen to the final few witnesses. When it was time to leave the court, she found that she was trembling. Lilian’s face was whiter than ever. The mix of feelings was too much, the slim new chance almost unwelcome; it had been easier to remain in despair. They got down to the street and hailed a taxi, but she didn’t want to be still, not even for the brief ride to Walworth. She didn’t want to have to speak, in case all that came out of her were tears. She saw Lilian into the cab, then shook her head and drew back. She closed the door, and if Lilian called to her to wait, the words were lost. She began to walk. The rain had turned to a fine drizzle, and the pavements were slimy. Her boots began to let in the filthy water at once. But as she made the long journey home to Champion Hill she felt what she had tried and failed to feel the day before: she looked at the city and was sick with love for it, sick with yearning to remain a part of it, to remain alive and young and unconfined and bursting with sensation. Her tired muscles began to ache, but even the ache was dear to her, even the blisters on her heels. She’d be a thing of aches and blisters for the rest of her days, she thought; she’d ask for nothing, trouble no one; if only they’d let her keep her freedom, if only they’d let her keep her life.

  By the time she arrived at the house the fizz of her feelings had begun to subside. Her mother exclaimed at the sight of her, hurried her out of her wet things. She warmed herself at the kitchen stove, washed the dirt from her feet, stuffed newspaper into her boots, put her coat and hat to dry. But when she went up to her bedroom, the spell of the walk was still on her. She lit a lamp, drew on clean clothes, then stood and gazed around the neat, plain room with passionate eyes. Who would love these things when she was gone? What would they mean to anyone else? The candlesticks, the photographs of her brothers, the prints on the wall, the books —

  Her eye was caught by Anna Karenina. She drew it free, and opened it up at the page at which she’d left a marker: the scene at the Moscow station, Anna stepping down from the train.

  She took the lamp, and crossed the landing, and went into the sitting-room.

  She thought she had gone in there looking for Lilian. But this time the things she noticed all belonged to Leonard, his leather writing-case on the shelf, the battered box of Snakes and Ladders, his tennis racket, still in its frame, ready for the next tournament. Had they been real, those matches of his? Or had he spent the days with Billie? Had he loved her, as she’d loved Lilian?

  Gipsy caravans. Adam and Eve.

  Oh, Leonard, she thought, what a mess we made of things! She remembered the intent and frightening way in which he had grabbed her, that night. She remembered the look of betrayal and rage that had come into his face. But he couldn’t have foreseen all this; he couldn’t have wanted any of this… If only she could talk to him! It seemed absurd, all at once, that she couldn’t. She had carted his body down the stairs, she had seen him laid out on a mortuary slab, she had watched his coffin being lowered into the ground; but somehow she hadn’t until this moment absorbed the simple, staggering fact that he had once been here and now was gone. His
whistling, his boasting, his yodelling yawns, his innuendoes: it was all of it gone. Where on earth was he? She moved forward, lifting the lamp, almost as if she were searching for him and the light would reveal him. But even the stains of his blood were invisible, in the gloom. He might have been spirited away by a wizard: it was as confounding and as pointless as that.

  She heard a creaking on the landing, and turned to find that her mother had come up the stairs. She was peering cautiously in from the open doorway.

  ‘Is everything all right, Frances? I wondered what you were doing.’

  She answered, after a hesitation, ‘I was thinking of Leonard.’

  Her mother must have heard the catch of emotion in her voice. She came forward into the room. ‘I think of him too. I think of him often. It wasn’t kind, it wasn’t right, the way he behaved to Mrs Barber; but one can’t help but miss him. I still have nightmares when I picture him lying alone out there, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances, truthfully.

  ‘And all his things, still here…’ She sighed, and tutted. ‘Dear, dear.’ The words and the gesture were mild, but had an infinite weight of grief behind them. ‘What an unlucky house this has been for men, hasn’t it? Or unlucky for women, I suppose I ought to say. I know your brothers are at peace now.’

  Frances said, ‘Do you really know it?’

  ‘I haven’t a single doubt about it. Them, and your dear father. And Mr Barber, too – though it’s hard to imagine him at rest, he was so lively. There are his tennis shoes, look, with the heels trodden down. I remember after your father died finding his pipe with tobacco in it – fresh tobacco, waiting for the match. It was almost more distressing than seeing him in his coffin. Mrs Barber will find it hard, when she comes to take her things. Has she spoken to you about that? She’ll be able to think more clearly, of course, once this dreadful trial is behind her. But has she given you any sense of her plans? She’ll remain at her mother’s, I suppose.’