The Paying Guests

  ‘Oh, now, on Wednesday,’ said Frances’s mother apologetically, ‘I’ve promised to see Mrs Playfair. I really must see her next week, to discuss the bazaar, and Wednesday afternoon is the only time she can manage. We shall have to miss our trip to the cinema, I’m afraid. Unless we go another day?’

  Frances felt absurdly disappointed. Could they make it Monday, instead? But, no, Monday wasn’t possible, and neither was Thursday. She could always go alone, of course. She could always invite a friend. She did have friends – not just Christina. She had friends right here in Camberwell. There was Margaret Lamb, a few houses down. There was Stella Noakes, from school – Stella Noakes, with whom she’d once, in a chemistry lesson, laughed so painfully hard that the two of them had wet their flannel drawers.

  But Margaret was always so awfully earnest. And Stella Noakes was Stella Rifkind now, with two small children. She might bring the children along. Would that be fun? It hadn’t been, last time. No, she’d rather go alone.

  But how dismal, at her age, to be so disappointed over something like this! She pushed the food around on her plate, enjoying it less than ever – and picturing Christina and Stevie, who would almost certainly at that moment be eating some jolly scratch supper of macaroni, or bread and cheese, or fried fish and chips, and who might be heading off shortly to the sort of brainy West End entertainment – a lecture or a concert, cheap seats at the Wigmore Hall – to which Frances and Christina had used to like to go together.

  Her spirits lifted slightly when, at half-past seven, Mr and Mrs Barber left the house, giving the distinct impression that they would be out until late. The moment they had gone she threw open the drawing-room door. She walked in and out of the kitchen and up and down the stairs, purely for the sake of being able to do so without fear of meeting anyone on the way. She lit the temperamental geyser and ran herself a bath, and as she lay in the water she summoned up a sense of possession and allowed it to expand across the house: she felt it as a physical sensation, a letting-out of breath, a loosening of nerves, through every blissfully untenanted room.

  But by twenty to ten the Barbers were back. She heard the front door open and close and couldn’t believe it. Mr Barber came straight out to visit the WC and caught her in the kitchen, in her dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, making cocoa. Oh, no, he said blandly, when she expressed surprise at seeing him, no, he wasn’t home earlier than planned. He and Lilian had been for an early evening drink with a friend of his. The friend was an old army chum, and they’d gone to meet his fiancée… Not noticing, or not minding, that she gave him no encouragement, he settled himself in what was becoming his ‘spot’ in the scullery doorway, and told her all about it.

  ‘The girl’s a saint,’ he said. ‘Or else, I dunno, she’s after his money! The poor devil lost both his arms, you see, Miss Wray, from here down.’ He made a cutting gesture at his elbow. ‘She’ll have to feed him his dinners, shave him, comb his hair – do everything for him.’ His blue eyes held hers. ‘The mind fairly boggles, doesn’t it?’

  There it was, she thought, the little innuendo, as reliable as a cuckoo coming open-mouthed out of a clock. She wished he didn’t feel it necessary to go on like this. She wished he’d leave her to herself in her kitchen. She was conscious of her dressing-gown, of the strands of damp hair at her neck, of her slightly downy ankles. She went rigidly back and forth between the counter and the stove, willing him to go; but, just as he had that other time, he seemed to like to watch her working. His colour was high, she noticed. He smelt, distinctly, of beer and cigarettes. She had the sense, perhaps unfair, that he was enjoying having her at a disadvantage.

  He headed out to the yard at last. She washed up the milk pan, carried the cocoa through to the drawing-room, and as she handed the cup to her mother she said, ‘I’ve just been collared by Mr Barber. What an annoying man he is. I’ve made every effort to like him, but —’

  ‘Mr Barber?’ Her mother had been dozing in her chair, and pushed herself up to sit more tidily. ‘I am growing quite fond of him.’

  Frances sat. ‘You can’t be serious. When do you see him, even?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve had our chats. He’s always very civil. I find him cheery.’

  ‘He’s a menace! How his wife ended up with him, I can’t imagine. She seems such a pleasant woman. Not at all his type.’

  They were speaking in their special furtive ‘Barber’ voice. But her mother blew on her cocoa and didn’t reply. Frances looked at her. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Well,’ she answered at last, ‘Mrs Barber doesn’t strike me as the most doting of wives. She might take a little more care, for instance, over her household duties.’

  ‘Doting?’ said Frances. ‘Duties? How mid-Victorian you sound!’

  ‘It seems to me that “Victorian” is a word that’s used nowadays to dismiss all sorts of virtues over which people no longer wish to take the trouble. I always saw to it that the house was nicely kept for your father.’

  ‘What you saw, in fact, was Nelly and Mabel keeping it nice for you.’

  ‘Well, servants don’t manage themselves – as you would know, if we still had any. They take a great deal of thought and care. And I always sat down to breakfast alongside your father looking cheerful and nicely dressed. That sort of thing means a great deal to a man. Mrs Barber – well, I am surprised that she returns to bed once her husband has gone to work. And when she does attend to her chores, she seems to do them at a gallop, in order to spend the rest of the day at her leisure.’

  Frances had thought the same thing, with envy. She opened her mouth to say as much – then closed it again, and said nothing. She had noticed, perhaps belatedly, how weary her mother was looking tonight. Her cheeks seemed as slack and as dry as overwashed linen. It took her an age to drink her cocoa, and when she had put the cup aside she sat with her hands in her lap, the fingers moving restlessly together with a paper-like sound, her gaze unfixed, on nothing.

  In another ten minutes they rose to go to bed. Frances lingered in the drawing-room to put things tidy and to turn down the lights, then headed across the hall, yawning as she went. But as she entered the kitchen passage she heard a cry of alarm or upset; she went running, and found her mother in the scullery, shrinking back in distress from the sight of something that was wriggling in the shadow of the sink.

  They had been bothered by mice for a week or two, and Frances had put down traps. Now, at last, a mouse had been caught – but caught badly, pinned by its mangled back legs. It was making frantic efforts to escape.

  She moved forward. ‘All right.’ She spoke calmly. ‘I’ll see to it.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘Now, don’t look.’

  ‘Shall we call Mr Barber?’

  ‘Mr Barber? Whatever for? I can do it.’

  The mouse grew even more panicked at Frances’s approach, its little front paws scrabbling uselessly at the wire that held it. There was no point in attempting to release it; it was too injured for that. But Frances didn’t want to leave it to die. After a moment of indecision she ran water into a bucket and dropped the wriggling creature into it, trap and all. A single silvery bubble rose to the surface of the water, along with a line of blood, fine as dark red cotton.

  ‘Those beastly traps!’ said her mother, still upset.

  ‘Yes, he was unlucky.’

  ‘What will you do with him?’

  She rolled up a sleeve, drew the trap from the bucket and shook off the drips. ‘I’ll take him outside, down to the ash-heap. You go on to bed.’

  The water had made greasy-looking spikes of the mouse’s fur, but in death the creature appeared oddly human, with pained, closed eyes and a slack lower jaw. She carefully released the little body, catching hold of it by its gristly tail. On a rack beside the back door were various old coats and shoes. She thought she would do without a coat, but the grass might be damp; she stepped into a pair of galoshes that had once belonged to her brother Noel, and let herself out into the
yard. With the mouse dangling from her fingers she clumped across to the lawn, then began to pick her way along the flagstone path that led down the garden.

  Lights showed at one or two of her neighbours’ windows, but the garden had high walls, a towering linden tree, shaggy laurels and hydrangeas, and was almost completely dark. She went by sense rather than by sight, having made the journey so many times before. Arriving at the low wooden fence that formed a screen around the ash-heap, she tossed the tiny corpse over. There was a percussive little rustle as it landed.

  And after that there was a silence, one of those deep, deep hushes that sometimes fell or gathered up here on Champion Hill, even by daylight. They gave the place a lonely air, made it impossible to believe that just a stone’s throw in any direction were houses with families and servants in them, that beyond the far garden wall was a cinder lane that led in a trice to a road, an ordinary road with rattling trams and buses on it. Frances thought of her walk through Westminster earlier that day; but she couldn’t recapture it now. All that sort of thing had fallen away. Bricks, pavements, people: all melted away. There were only the trees, the plants, the invisible flowers, a sense of stealthy vegetable activity just below the surface of sound.

  It was rather creepy, suddenly. She drew closed the lapels of her dressing-gown and turned to head back to the house.

  But as she did it, something caught her eye: a point of light bobbing about on the darkness. A second later, smelling tobacco, she realised that the light was the burning tip of a cigarette. Her eyes changed their focus, and she made out a figure.

  Someone was there, in the garden with her.

  She let out a yelp of fear and surprise. But it was Mr Barber, that was all. He came forward, laughing, apologising for having given her a fright. The night was such a nice one, he said, that he’d stayed out to make the most of it. He hadn’t liked to speak, before; it had seemed a pity to disturb her. He hoped she didn’t mind, that he’d wandered down the garden?

  For a moment she wanted to hit him. The blood was roaring through her ears; she felt herself quivering like a bell. She’d supposed that he’d gone up to bed ages ago. He must have been out here for – well, close on half an hour. She didn’t like to think that he had been near by while she’d been standing at the ash-heap so unguardedly. She wished she hadn’t let out that yelp. She was glad, at any rate, that he couldn’t see her in Noel’s galoshes.

  And, after all, he had only done what she herself had done, been tempted to linger out here by the balminess of the night. Her quivering began to subside. She explained stiffly about the mouse, and he chuckled. ‘Poor blighter! He just wanted his bit of cheese, didn’t he?’ He lifted his cigarette to his mouth, so that the blazing point of it reappeared, briefly illuminating his slender hand, his moustache, his foxy jaw.

  But when the cigarette had faded he spoke again, and she could tell by the sound of his voice that he had tilted back his head.

  ‘A grand night for star-gazing tonight, Miss Wray! I used to know all about the stars when I was a boy; it was a regular hobby of mine. I used to sneak out my bedroom window after the family were asleep and sit for hours on the scullery roof, with a library book and a bicycle lamp – matching the sky, you know, with the pictures. My brother Dougie caught me at it once, and locked the window on me, so that I had to stay out all night in the rain. He was always pulling stunts like that, my brother. But it was worth it. I had all the names: Arcturus, Regulus, Vega, Capella…’

  He was murmuring now, and the words had a charm, spoken softly in the darkness. It was odd to be standing there with him, in her night-clothes, in that lonely spot – but then, she thought, it’s only the garden. Looking back at the house she saw the lights: the kitchen door standing open, the window with its blind half lowered, the window above it, at the turn of the stairs, with the old Morris curtains not quite meeting in the middle.

  And he had been right about the night. The moon was slim, the merest paring; against the deep blue-black of the sky the stars stood out, precise, electric. So she put back her head, and, ‘Which one is Capella?’ she asked, after a pause. She had been attracted by the name.

  He gestured with the hand that held the cigarette. ‘The bright little chap above your neighbour’s chimney. That’s Vega, over there. And up there —’ He shifted about, and she turned to follow the glow of the cigarette. ‘That’s Polaris, the North Star.’

  She nodded. ‘I know the North Star.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I know the Plough, and Orion.’

  ‘You’re as good as a Girl Guide. How about Cassiopeia?’

  ‘The ones shaped like an M? Yes, I know them.’

  ‘They’re a W tonight. You see them? That’s Perseus beside them.’

  ‘No, I don’t see that.’

  ‘It’s a matter of joining the dots. You have to use your imagination. The fellows who did the naming – well, they were short on entertainments back then. How about Gemini, the twins?’ He moved closer, and sketched an outline. ‘You see the two of them? Holding hands? And just across from them there’s the Lion… To the right of him there’s the Crab. And there’s the Whiting.’

  She peered. ‘The Whiting?’

  ‘Just over there, beside the Whelk.’

  She realised two things at the same moment: one, of course, that he was teasing her; the other that, in order to steer her gaze, he had moved very close to her and raised his free hand to the small of her back. The unexpectedness of the contact gave her a jolt: it made her start away from him, her shoulder clipping his as she did so, her galoshes noisy on the path. He seemed to step back too, to put up his hands in an exaggerated way, like a man caught out at something, playfully pretending innocence.

  Or perhaps he really was innocent. She was suddenly uncertain. It was too dark to make out his expression; she could see only faint gleams of starlight at his eyes, his teeth. Was he smiling? Was he laughing at her? She had the tricked, trapped feeling she’d sometimes had with men in the past, the sense that, through no act of her own, she had become a figure of fun, and that whatever she did or said now would only make her more of one.

  And she felt the loneliness of the spot again, the moist and crafty garden. It seemed to be on Mr Barber’s side, in a way it hadn’t been before. She tightened the belt of her dressing-gown, straightened her back, and spoke coldly.

  ‘You oughtn’t to linger out here, Mr Barber. Your wife must be wondering where you are.’

  As she expected, he laughed, though with a sort of wryness that she didn’t understand.

  ‘Oh, I dare say Lily can live without me for another minute or two. I’ll just have my smoke out, Miss Wray, and then I’ll wend my way to bed.’

  She left him without a farewell, stumping back to the house, feeling just as much of a fool as she’d known she would. Once she had kicked off the galoshes she saw to the stove and the breakfast things at top speed, not wanting to have to encounter him for a third time that night. But in any case, he didn’t appear. She was up in her room, groping for the pins in her hair, before she heard the back door closed and bolted.

  She listened to his step on the stairs with a lingering crossness – but found herself curious, too, as to how he would greet his wife. She thought of Christina asking her if she had put a tumbler to the wall. But it wasn’t eavesdropping, was it, if one simply stole closer to the door and tilted one’s head?

  She heard Mrs Barber’s voice first. ‘There you are! I thought you’d got lost. What have you been doing?’

  He answered with a yawn. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You must have been doing something.’

  ‘Having a smoke, out the back. Looking at the stars.’

  ‘The stars? Did you see your future in them?’

  ‘Oh, I know that already, don’t I?’

  That was all they said. But the way in which they said it – the absolute deadness of their tones, the absence of anything like affection – took Frances aback. It had never occurred
to her that their marriage might be anything other than happy. Now, astonished, she thought, Why, they might almost hate each other!

  Well, their feelings were their own affair, she supposed. So long as they paid their rent… But that was thinking like a landlady; that was a horrible way to think. She didn’t want them to be miserable. But she felt unnerved, too. She was reminded of how little she knew them. And here they were, at the heart of her house! Her mind ran back, unwillingly, to Stevie’s warning about the ‘clerk class’.

  She wished now that she hadn’t listened. She crept into bed and blew out her candle, but lay wakeful, open-eyed. She heard the couple moving about between their sitting-room and kitchen, and soon one of them paused on the landing – Mr Barber, yawning again. She watched the shrinking away of the light from under her door as he turned down the gas.

  3

  Her sense of disquiet passed with the night. When the couple rose in the morning they sounded ordinary, even cheerful. Mr Barber was humming as he shaved at the sink. Before he left for his half-Saturday at the office he said something in a low tone to his wife, and she answered him with laughter.

  An hour or so later, Frances left the house herself: she went to the florist’s to fetch the wreath for her father’s grave. And as soon as she and her mother had had their lunch, they set off for the cemetery.

  The weather had dulled overnight, and they had dressed for it, and for the occasion, in their soberest coats and hats. But it was May, after all: they grew warm on the journey to West Norwood, and warmer still as they made the long uphill walk to her father’s plot. By the time they arrived at it, Frances was sweating. She took off her gloves, considered removing her hat – had got as far as drawing out its pin before she caught her mother’s disapproving eye.

  ‘Father wouldn’t mind, would he? He hated being too warm himself, remember?’