The Paying Guests

  ‘I – I’m not sure. Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Well, be certain to tell her to take just as long as she needs. And then, once she has gone —’ She paused. ‘Well, we must do it all over again, must we? Find new people for these rooms?’

  The thought was terrible. But Frances nodded. ‘What else can we do, if we mean to stay? But, then, the house – I don’t know. So many things are going wrong.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought I could hold it all together, but —’

  ‘Well, don’t think about it now. We’ll sort it out, between us. It’s only a lot of bricks and mortar. Its heart stopped, Frances, years ago… You look tired again. This frightful business at the court! I wish you’d keep away from it. You really think it will end tomorrow?’

  Frances lowered her gaze. ‘Yes, tomorrow will end it.’

  ‘Though not, I suppose, for that boy and his family. What a nightmare we’ve all been caught in! If you had told me, in the summer – No, I should never have believed you. Oh, won’t it be a weight off our minds when it’s all over and done with!’

  She turned away as she spoke, rubbing her arms against the chill. Frances noticed the stoop of her shoulders, the elderly way she reached for the doorpost as she headed out to the landing.

  She felt her mouth grow dry. ‘Mother —’

  Her mother turned back to her, her dark brows lifted. ‘Yes?’

  ‘If anything were ever to happen to me —’

  ‘Happen to you? What do you mean? Oh, we’ve let ourselves grow morbid! Come back down out of the gloom.’

  ‘No, wait. If something were to happen – I know I haven’t always been kind to you. I know I wasn’t kind to Father. I’ve always tried to do what I thought to be right. But sometimes —’

  Her mother’s joined hands made their papery sound. ‘You mustn’t grow upset, Frances. Remember what Dr Lawrence said.’

  ‘It’s just – You wouldn’t ever despise me, would you, Mother?’

  ‘Despise you! Good gracious! Why would I ever do that?’

  ‘Sometimes things become a muddle. They become such a muddle, Mother, that they turn into a sort of quicksand. You take a step, and can’t get free, and —’

  She couldn’t continue. Her mother waited, looking troubled – but looking weary, too. Finally she sighed. ‘What a fight you’ve always made of everything, Frances. And all I ever wanted for you were such ordinary things: a husband, a home, a family of your own. Such ordinary, ordinary things. You mustn’t worry about the house. The house has become too great a burden. It isn’t a house for guests, after all. Mrs Barber came here as an unhappy woman, and I’m afraid she took advantage of your – your kindness. But, despise you! I could never despise you, any more than I could despise my own hand. Now, come down with me, will you? Back to the warm.’

  Frances hesitated, still struggling – though she didn’t know now if she was struggling to speak or to stay silent. But at last she nodded, and moved forward, and followed her mother from the room. She wanted to be comforted, that was all. She wanted it so much. It didn’t matter, she told herself, as they started down the stairs, it didn’t really matter that the two of them had been talking about different things.

  And once the final day had arrived, and she and Lilian were back in their taxi, back at the Old Bailey, back on their bench, she found it hard to remember that they had ever had a life beyond the courtroom. It seemed an absolute eternity since, three mornings before, she had crossed the floor, alone and uncertain; an eternity since she had looked at the clerks and the barristers and seen only a flock of jackdaws. She knew them now as individuals, almost as friends: the man who breathed with a whistle, the one who liked to crack his knuckles, the one who sucked white peppermints, that sometimes appeared, startlingly, from between his thin, dry lips. The court was much fuller than it had been at the start. The trial had gathered spectators as the days had passed, and witnesses had stayed or returned, to be fitted in as best they could – so that, if she peered past the heads and shoulders in front of her, she could see Spencer’s mother and uncle elbow to elbow with the police surgeon, while Inspector Kemp and Sergeant Heath sat squashed beside Leonard’s boss from the Pearl. How extraordinary it was to realise that all this fuss had been set in motion by that little collision in her mother’s old bedroom on Champion Hill. How astonishing that all these people had been hoicked together in this bright place because of that single intimate encounter between Lilian, Leonard and her.

  The morning was given over to the counsels’ closing speeches. Mr Ives went first, and there it was, laid out again, every incriminating detail, the threats, the boasts, the weapon, the blood. The boy’s distress over the behaviour of his fiancée, he told the jury, was of no account at all. He had shown himself in his treatment of her to be a most degenerate character. As for his alibi, well – Here his tone grew withering. Mrs Ward’s devotion to her son was so complete, it might almost be said to be blind. Her neighbour claimed to have seen the boy at home on the critical night, but he had admitted his own dishonesty in other matters, and it was for the jury to decide how far that dishonesty extended. Perhaps the best that could be said about a man like that was that he would take on just about any sort of employment for a fee…

  He spoke for an hour and three-quarters. When Mr Tresillian rose to begin his own long speech for the defence, the room had begun to feel airless; he had to raise his voice over coughs and shuffles. He had every respect, he said, for his learned colleague Mr Ives, but the Crown in this case had failed in its first duty: that of establishing the guilt, beyond any particle of doubt, of the accused, Spencer Ward. What, after all, did the evidence against the boy really amount to? Miss Grey, a key witness, had morals that would shame a shop-girl. The hairs and the blood were as good as worthless. The rest was circumstance and supposition. There were two points only on which the jury could be certain, and one was that Leonard Arthur Barber had been killed by a blow to the head; the other was that the person or persons who had struck that blow had so far evaded capture. The accused himself had speculated that they were ‘laughing themselves sick’. Mr Tresillian did not know about that, but they must certainly be looking on at these proceedings with very mixed feelings indeed…

  By the time the lunch hour had passed, and it was the judge’s turn to speak, and Frances understood that he meant to take them in close, dry detail through the crime, the police inquiry, through every single scrap of evidence that had been submitted to the court, a great weariness overtook her – not just the accumulated weariness of the past few days, but a vaster fatigue, a thing like a heavy, heavy cloak suddenly laid across her shoulders. She did her best to listen, but his voice was nasal and elderly and retained its peevish note, and it was shockingly easy, she found, simply to think of other things. He reminded the jury that the accused, by his own confession, was a violent young man, who had never attempted to deny the grudge that he had borne against the victim… Here she found herself gazing at a man on the bench in front of her: he was holding his head at such an angle that she could see right into his ear, see the hairs in the little tunnel and the crumbs of wax that clung to them. She blinked, and returned her attention to the judge. He was talking now about the traces of blood that had been found on the cosh. Mr Palmer, he said, a police surgeon of many years’ standing, had given it as his opinion that the blood was human. Another surgeon, of lesser experience, but nonetheless a man to whom the jury might feel inclined to give credence, had stated by contrast that…

  But she’d begun looking around the court again, at the people gathered in it. A uniformed policeman was blank-eyed with boredom: he was fingering his chin, worrying away at a pimple or shaving-cut. Mr Ives and Mr Tresillian were both making notes. Inspector Kemp and Sergeant Heath were murmuring together, the inspector polishing his spectacles as he did it: without the discs of glass before them his eyes looked naked as unshelled molluscs. Spencer’s face was slightly puffy. Perhaps he had passed a sleepless n
ight.

  She thought of that little chalk gallows: the stick figure was almost complete. She heard the ticking of the courtroom clock, casually chipping away at the future. If only Lilian would turn to her – if only Lilian would look, just once, in the old way – it would all be a shade, just a shade, more bearable.

  But Lilian sat rigid, in that beetly coat, that horrible veil, and looked at nothing.

  And presently the nasal voice paused, then changed its note. ‘Members of the jury,’ it was saying, ‘you have had the evidence laid before you. I am going to ask you now to retire and begin your deliberations. Have you any questions or requests?’

  Frances’s heart lost a beat. They had got to this point already! All eyes went to the jury; but it seemed they had everything they needed. They rose and filed away, she noticed, without a glance at the boy, without once looking at his mother or his uncle.

  And then there was nothing to do but wait, and nowhere to do it but there in the courtroom or just outside, in the cathedral-like hall. They had been sitting for hours, and the room was stuffier than ever. The Barber men went off at once, and after a few indecisive minutes she and Lilian followed, to stand blinking at the riot of marble and fresco. Why on earth, she wondered, couldn’t the place have been made restful? Why couldn’t it have plain white monastery walls? The swirls of colour set her stomach quivering. The polished hard floor made her think of falling over with a smack. Leonard’s father and Uncle Ted and Douglas had claimed one of the padded benches. A neighbouring bench came free; she and Lilian took it, in silence. Presently Spencer’s mother and uncle appeared, and settled down a few yards off, avoiding the Barbers’ eyes as they did it. Douglas watched them, but addressed his father in a pointed, unmuted way.

  ‘All right, Dad? We won’t be here long. The jury’s got nothing to debate, has it?’

  His confidence, however, went for nothing. Thirty minutes became forty, became fifty, became an hour. Lilian remained shut in a realm of her own. The padding on the bench seemed to lose its spring. Voices and footsteps swelled and faded. A bit of heat struggled inadequately from a metal grating. If one closed one’s eyes, Frances found, the sensation was that of sitting in some bleak but unavoidable municipal place – a bus station, say.

  But she was used to that by now, used to this kind of waiting, that was slack as worn elastic yet had the tautness of wire. She thought of all the lobbies, corridors and ante-rooms in which she and Lilian had had to sit and wait since Leonard’s death, all the institutional spaces, not quite public, not quite private. They were like places outside time, outside life – a kind of limbo. Was that where Leonard was, after all? She tried to imagine the people who might staff it. Wingless angels, perhaps. And every one of them with the same expression that she had seen on the faces of the policemen, porters, matrons, warders, clerks and officials who had guided the way through the nightmare of the past two months, the obliging but impersonal look of men and women who saw other people’s catastrophes every working day and could shrug them off for a tea-break and a stretch of the legs.

  Oh, for a cup of tea now! But, of course, they dared not stray too far, for fear that the verdict would come. Spencer’s uncle wandered the length of the hall like a man on a station platform. ‘Gets on your nerves, don’t it?’ he announced grimly, on his return. The Barber men bristled and ignored him, but Frances met his gaze and nodded, though without a smile. How could she smile at him? When had she smiled last, in fact? When had she laughed? She couldn’t remember. A sudden dreadful idea took hold of her. Suppose she were never to laugh again? Suppose she were never to sing or dance or kiss or do anything careless again? Suppose she were never to walk in a garden, never walk anywhere save grey prison spaces, never see a child, a cat, a dog, a river, a mountain, an open sky —

  The bubble of panic was punctured by one of Douglas’s snorts of disgust. Footsteps were approaching from the staircase. She turned her head to follow his gaze and saw that the girl, Billie, was back.

  She must have come to hear the verdict. She was, apparently, quite alone. She went to the door of the courtroom first, and spoke to the policeman there. He explained the situation, and gestured to the waiting-area; she looked over, saw the Barbers, saw the Wards, saw Lilian, but came bravely, in her tapping heels, to perch herself at the end of a bench – she put herself almost directly opposite to Lilian and Frances. Her coat was the powder-blue one that she had worn on Monday. Her hat was different, a thing of mauve velour with a silk rose on the brim: it was pulled down low, nearly meeting her collar, so that, from the side, all that was visible of her face was the tip of her nose and her childish chin. She nodded awkwardly to Spencer’s mother, and the little woman nodded awkwardly back. The uncle, however, glared at her – her arrival, bizarrely, having put him, just for the moment, on the same side as the Barbers. As for Lilian, she watched the girl come, she watched her sit, she watched her take out a powder-compact and tidy her face, she watched her put the compact away – the stare going on for so long, yet remaining so blank and unbroken, that Frances began to be unnerved by it; it was like the stare of a corpse.

  Then, abruptly, without warning, without a word to Frances or anyone, Lilian got to her feet and began to make her way across the marble floor. There could be no mistake about where she was headed. Spencer’s mother and uncle and the Barber men all turned at the sound of her steps. The girl turned too at her approach – then gave a start, her courage failing; she even shrank back when Lilian came to a halt in front of her, as if expecting to be struck. When Lilian simply spoke to her in a murmur, she looked up at her with her lips parted and her eyes wide. ‘Yes,’ Frances heard her say in surprise. Then: ‘No. Yes.’ And then: ‘Thank you.’

  And that was it. The whole exchange took perhaps twenty seconds. She ducked her head again as Lilian moved off, her face flaming through its powder.

  Lilian looked at no one. She didn’t re-join Frances on the bench. Instead she left the hall, disappearing into the passage that led to the ladies’ cloak-room.

  When five minutes went by and she did not return, Frances went after her.

  She was alone in the small room. The lavatory doors stood open. A frosted window was ajar on to a light-well; she was leaning against the sill, smoking the last of a cigarette. When she saw Frances she was still for a moment, then turned away, stubbed the cigarette out, and flicked it from the window. Then she went to one of the basins, to examine her face in the mirror above it.

  Frances addressed her almost shyly. ‘I wondered if you were all right.’

  She had opened her handbag and was fishing in it. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’

  ‘What – What did you say to her?’

  She brought out a little pot of rouge. As Frances watched, she drew off her glove and tapped a fingertip into the colour, tapped the colour on to her lower lip, her upper lip, her cheeks – the gesture accentuating that odd resemblance between her and the girl herself. ‘I told her I was sorry for her,’ she said, as she returned the rouge to her handbag. ‘I said she ought to be in my clothes. That she’s more Len’s widow than I am. It’s true, isn’t it? She ought to have that horrible money. Maybe I’ll leave it to her in my will. She’ll get it soon enough, that way.’

  Her voice shook on the last few words. She snapped the handbag closed, then leaned forward over the basin, holding on to the straight white sides of it as though to keep herself from sinking to the floor. But when Frances went towards her, she moved away.

  ‘Don’t, Frances. It’s no good, you know it isn’t.’

  ‘Please, Lilian. I can’t bear it. I —’

  ‘No. Don’t you see? If you try, if you touch me, you’ll only remind me, you’ll make it worse… Oh, why can’t it all be over with! We know what the jury’s going to say. I wish they’d just say it about me. Say it here and now, today! They could give me the rope and I’d do it myself.’

  ‘It won’t come to that. There’s still a chance.’

  She drooped, exhausted. ‘O
h, Frances, you know there isn’t. You know it, deep down. All this time we’ve been pretending. We’ve been pretending from the start. The start of everything, I mean.’

  ‘The start of everything,’ repeated Frances. Then, ‘I never pretended for a moment, Lilian,’ she said simply, ‘when I was with you. It was everyone else I pretended with. – No, don’t answer, listen to me, because there isn’t any time any more, and I want to tell you, I have to tell you – Nothing’s changed, in how I feel about you. I went mad for a while, that’s all. I let what happened – I let it spoil things. It’s broken my heart that I did that. I burned your letter. You remember? The most wonderful letter anyone ever wrote me, and I burned it. I burned it! I did it to save my own skin. I barely knew I had a skin until I met you. Tell me you believe it. This is a place for truth, isn’t it? We’ve heard nothing in it but lies, but tell me, please tell me, that you know I love you, that you know it’s true.’

  Breathless, she came to a halt. They faced each other in a silence broken by the trickle of a faulty cistern, by the flutter of pigeons in the light-well. The room smelt of bleach and of sour wet mops. But Lilian looked back at her with eyes grown silvery with tears, and for a moment the room, the trial, Leonard, the summer, their whole affair – it was as if none of it had yet happened. As if their love were all to be done again, but done properly, done honestly. As if they were back in Frances’s bedroom the day after Snakes and Ladders, that imaginary stake just drawn from her heart.