The Paying Guests

  ‘Father always knew when to keep a hat on, however warm he was.’

  Frances thrust the pin back in, turning away. ‘I’ll bet he’s warm just now.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said, “I’ll get some water now.”’

  ‘Oh.’ Her mother looked wary. ‘Yes, do.’

  They unpacked their tools, their cemetery kit: the trowel, the rake, the brush, the bottle, the bar of Monkey Brand. Her mother got to work on the weeds and the moss while Frances went to the tap. She returned to the grave to wet the brush and draw it across the soap, and then to start scrubbing at her father’s headstone.

  The stone was plain, solid, handsome – expensive, she thought, on every visit, with resentment; for, of course, the funeral arrangements had all been made in the first bewildering days after her father’s death, before she and her mother had had a chance to discover just how stupendously he had managed to mishandle the family funds. JOHN FRYER WRAY, the inscription read, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER, MUCH MISSED, the letters black against a marble that had once been a gleaming quartz white, but which the sooty drizzles of suburban south London were bent on staining khaki.

  Running her brush in soapy circles over the tarnished marble she thought of her brother John Arthur’s grave, just north of Combles: she and her mother had visited it, along with John Arthur’s fiancée, Edith, in 1919. They had made the journey in December – perhaps the worst time to do it, for in the bitter weather the raw, still-shattered landscape had looked like a scene from hell. There had been no shred of comfort to be found in it, only a new sort of agony in thinking of the months that John Arthur had been forced to spend there. Since then, Frances had heard people speak of the consolations of the cemeteries. One of her mother’s friends had described the sense of peace that had descended on her as she’d stood at her son’s grave. She had heard his voice, she’d said, as clearly as she had ever heard it in life: he had told her not to mourn, that mourning was wasteful, mourning would keep the world in darkness when what it needed was to progress into light. At John Arthur’s grave Frances had heard nothing save the wet cough of the elderly farmer who had guided the way to the site. The plot itself had meant little to her. It had simply been beyond belief that all she had known and loved about her brother should have had its finish in that slim depression of earth at her feet. She regretted ever having made the trip. She still visited the place, sometimes, in dreams, and felt the same empty horror; she was always alone on the sticky ground, sinking.

  Then again, Noel had no grave at all, and that was hard in a different way. He had been lost in the Mediterranean, in the final year of the War, when the ship on which he’d been travelling out of Egypt had been torpedoed. How exactly had he died? Had he drowned? Could he have been killed in the first blast? There had been confusion at the time, someone claiming to have seen him floating face-down in the water, someone else alleging that he had been hauled on to a raft, wounded but very much alive. But no such raft had ever been found. Might the enemy have picked him up? Certainly his body was never recovered; and so many tales had been told, in those days, of the miraculous reappearances of shell-shocked soldiers that for months after his death, well into the first year of Peace, Frances’s mother had clung on to the hope of his return. There had been several dreadful moments: knocks at the door at odd hours, boys on the street who faintly resembled him… Frances shuddered to remember that time now. Poor, poor Noel. He had been the baby of the family. When she thought of him she saw him not as the nineteen-year-old he had been when he was killed, but as a boy in a striped pyjama suit, his pink feet smooth and rounded as pebbles. She remembered him once on the beach at Eastbourne, crying because a wave had gone over his head; she had jeered at his faint heart. She would give anything to be able to take that jeer back.

  Don’t think of it. Chase it away. Wet the brush again, quickly, quickly. Here was a spot that she had missed. Look how nicely the marble scrubbed up! That was better… She had left the headstone now and was inching her way around the coving. A few more trips to the tap, and the job was done. Next time, she and her mother decided as they rose, they would bring a garden sieve and go through the earth properly; but they’d made it neat enough for this visit. Frances put away their tools, wiped her hands and addressed the grave.

  ‘Well, Father, there you are, all spruce and tidy for your birthday. It’s more than you deserve, I’m sure.’

  ‘Frances,’ her mother scolded.

  ‘What? I’d say the same thing to his face if he were here right now. That, and a good many other things. I suppose he’d manage not to hear them. It was about the only thing he could manage.’

  ‘Hush.’

  They stood a little longer, her mother dipping her head and closing her eyes in silent prayer, while Frances surreptitiously drew her wool collar away from her hot neck. They made the walk back to the gates through the older part of the cemetery, the part she by far preferred, with its vulgar last-century monuments, its weeping angels, its extinguished torches, its stone ships in full sail. She read aloud the Dickensian surnames. ‘Bode… Epps… Tooley… Weatherwax! Queer how the names belong to the period. Can surnames change, like fashions?’

  ‘Perhaps nobody cared to marry poor Mr Weatherwax.’

  ‘That’s what you think. “Sorely missed by his five surviving sons”! There ought to be Weatherwaxes all over the place at that rate.’

  Out on the street, they gazed doubtfully upward. Frances’s father had always admired the flower gardens in Dulwich Park, and they had planned to take a bus there, have their tea in the café, make a subdued Saturday afternoon of it. But the sky was darker and lower than ever – ‘Thundery,’ said Mrs Wray, who since the War was bothered by storms. They decided to give the day up and go straight home. They took a bus directly to Champion Hill, and had just stepped from its platform when the first great drops of rain came plashing down. They ran the last few yards to the house – Frances going quickest, to have the door open and ready. They tumbled into the hall, gasping and laughing and pulling off their wet things.

  Almost as soon as the door was closed behind them they became aware of a stir of voices and movement in the rooms upstairs. There were thumps, and bursts of laughter, followed by quick, light footsteps. Mrs Wray, taking off her hat, raised apprehensive eyes: ‘Good gracious!’

  Frances’s heart sank. ‘The Barbers,’ she murmured, ‘must be entertaining.’

  As she spoke, the footsteps crossed to the stairs, and the banisters of the upper flight were grasped and set creaking by small, sticky-looking hands. And then a couple of children appeared at the turn, a girl of seven or eight and a younger boy. The boy came first, frowning, determined, but troubled by the trickiness of the descent. Catching sight of Frances and her mother he gave a wobble, mid-step; then, blind with terror, he turned and groped his way past the girl’s legs to scramble back upward. The girl stayed where she was, holding Frances’s gaze, sucking in her lower lip and laughing.

  ‘He’s a baby,’ she said.

  Frances’s mother, her hat in her hand, had moved forward to peer anxiously after him.

  ‘He’s certainly too much of a baby to be allowed on these stairs. If he should fall – Go back, child!’

  The boy, safe now on the landing, and attracted by the tremor of alarm in her voice, had put his head through the spindles of the section of banister directly above her. She grew pale. ‘Get away!’ She made shooing motions at him. ‘Go back, little boy! Oh, if the banisters should break! Frances —’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said Frances, going ahead of her, beginning to climb.

  At her approach the girl sped off with a giggle, and the boy hastily withdrew his head. He must have caught his ear against one of the spindles as he did it, because after he’d gone scampering away in terror again – into the Barbers’ sitting-room this time, with the girl charging behind him – Frances heard him begin to wail. The wail was answered by a woman’s voice, brisk and satisfied: ‘Well,
now what have you done!’ At the same moment another woman put her face around the sitting-room door. Neither the voice nor the face belonged to Mrs Barber. This woman was older, perhaps Frances’s age. Her waved hair was glossy with oil, her mouth liberally lipsticked, her features rather sharp. She saw Frances and her mother advancing warily up the stairs and said, ‘Oh.’ She emerged further. ‘Did you want Lil? She’s out the back.’

  Frances, coming to a halt a stair or two from the top, explained about having been anxious for the children. She was afraid that she and her mother had frightened the little boy. She thought he might have hurt his ear on the banister?

  Aside from the moans of the injured child, the Barbers’ sitting-room, it seemed to her, had grown unnaturally still. She had the disturbing sense of its being packed with eavesdropping strangers. Unable to see anything past its partly open door, she said, ‘Is Mr Barber here, perhaps?’

  The woman snorted. ‘Lenny? Not him! He’s keeping out of our way. Lil won’t be a minute, though, if it’s her you’re after.’

  ‘No, it isn’t that,’ repeated Frances. ‘We just wanted to be sure about the little boy.’ She added, a touch crisply, ‘I’m Miss Wray. This is Mrs Wray, my mother. We’re the owners of the house.’

  At that, from the silent sitting-room, there burst yet another woman’s voice – a jolly, throaty, hop-picker’s one. ‘Is that Mrs Wray? Is that Mrs Wray, Vera?’

  The sharp-faced woman tilted her head, and with her gaze moving coolly between Frances and her mother she called back into the room: ‘Yes, and Miss Wray too!’

  ‘Well, for goodness sake, bring the ladies in! Don’t leave the poor things standing out there on the landing, in their own house.’

  The woman shrugged, and half smiled – as if to say to Frances, not unkindly, Now you’re for it. She moved back into the sitting-room, opening the door wider so that the Wrays might follow. Frances glanced at her mother; she was madly re-pinning her hat. The two of them climbed the last few stairs and crossed the landing.

  Entering a fug of scent and cigarette smoke they found – not a crowd, after all, but three women, sitting in chairs drawn together around the unlighted hearth. Frances noticed the chairs first, in fact, because one of them, a black oak armchair, looking surprisingly at home among the Barbers’ rococo trimmings, was not actually the Barbers’ at all; it was one of her father’s Jacobean monstrosities and had been brought up from the kitchen passage downstairs. Seated on it now was a short, stout woman of fifty or so, with brown button eyes, dreadfully swollen ankles, and hair so artificially frizzed and hennaed it resembled the lustreless wig of a waxwork. It was she, obviously, who had called out to the landing, for as Frances and her mother made their awkward entrance she said, in the same game Cockney tones, ‘Oh, Mrs Wray, Miss Wray, how very nice to meet you! How nice indeed! And Lil said we shouldn’t see you – that you’d be out all afternoon. Oh, what luck! I’m Mrs Viney. I hope you’ll excuse my not rising to shake your hands. You may see the state of things with me.’ She indicated her appalling ankles. ‘Once I’m down, I have to stay down. Min’ – she leaned to tap at the arm of a sandy-faced girl on the sofa – ‘give Mrs Wray your place, my darling. You can make do with the puff, a slip like you. – This is Min, my youngest,’ she told Frances, as if that explained everything. ‘Miss Lynch, I suppose I ought to call her, in a well-to-do house like this! And here’s Mrs Rawlins and Mrs Grice. My Lord, don’t that make me feel old! Mrs Grice you’ve just met, of course.’

  Frances could do nothing but move forward across a floor littered with bags and scarves and elaborate hats to shake hands with each of the visitors in turn. Her mother, protesting feebly that they oughtn’t to trouble, that she wouldn’t stay, was somehow steered to the vacant place on the sofa, beside the sharp-faced Mrs Grice – Vera. The girl called Min sat down on a red leather pouffe. Frances took the remaining empty chair, beside the woman who had been introduced as Mrs Rawlins.

  Mrs Rawlins was sitting in a pink plush easy chair of the Barbers’; she occupied it with an air of entitlement, like a slightly smug Madonna. The little boy had his face in her lap, his long-lashed eyes still wet with tears, but the tears themselves apparently forgotten; he seemed to be idly biting her thigh. He gazed up at Frances as he did it, and she repeated her anxiety about his having put his head between the banisters and possibly hurt his ear. Mrs Rawlins smiled – smiled in that pitying, knowing way in which married women often smiled, Frances had found, at the fears of spinsters, saying, Oh, they had ears of India-rubber at that age. And, to prove it, she reached for one of the boy’s already scarlet ears and drew the top and bottom tips of it together, then let them spring back against his scalp. The visitors laughed – the little girl laughing loudest, on a forced, hard, jarring note. The boy clapped his hands to his head, looking torn between triumph at having made a comedian of himself and mortification at the way he had done it. Mrs Viney, still tittering, said, ‘Poor Maurice. We oughtn’t to laugh. But there, if little boys will go putting their heads through other people’s banisters, they must expect to be laughed at.’ Her tone grew indulgent as she spoke, and she held out her hands to him. ‘Oh, come here to Nanny!’

  Come here to Nanny… While she fussed with the boy, the younger women looking on, Frances began to catch the resemblances between them all. Mrs Rawlins – Netta, the others called her – was, she realised, simply a more matronly Min. Vera had Mrs Viney’s button eyes, though with a drier expression in them. Even the boy and girl, she saw now, had the family look, the girl solid on sturdy legs, the boy fair but with the sort of fairness that would quickly darken, and each of them with a pink, full, elastic, unchildlike mouth – Mrs Barber’s mouth, in fact. She had just, with relief and surprise, worked the mystery out, when Mrs Barber herself came breathlessly into the room.

  She caught Frances’s eye first. ‘Miss Wray, I’m so sorry! Mrs Wray, how are you?’ Her smile pulled tight, and her tone wavered. ‘You’ve met my mother and my sisters, then?’

  ‘Oh, we’re great pals already,’ said Mrs Viney comfortably. ‘And there you were, Lil, saying as how the ladies would be out all day!’

  ‘She was hoping you wouldn’t meet us,’ Vera told Frances. ‘She’s ashamed of us.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mrs Barber, blushing.

  But, ‘Yes, that’s the truth of it!’ their mother cried gaily, her old-fashioned stays giving off a volley of pops and creaks. ‘Still, we make up in cheerfulness, Mrs Wray, what we lack in nice manners. And, oh, I do think this house delightful, really I do.’

  Frances’s mother, flushing, blinking, rapidly adjusting to the situation, said, ‘Thank you. Yes, it’s been a happy family home in its day. A little large, that’s all, for my daughter and me to manage now.’

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t want all that trouble. No, there’s nothing like a big house for trouble. There’s nothing brings your spirits down, I always think, like an empty room. You shall enjoy having company here now, I expect. And don’t you keep the back garden lovely!’

  ‘Oh, you’ve seen the garden, then?’

  ‘Yes, Lil took us over it.’

  ‘Just quickly,’ said Mrs Barber.

  ‘You might be right in the country here. Why, you’d never know you had a neighbour! Gives you quite a bank holiday mood. You could bring in trippers and do them teas. Now, a pokey old place like ours – we live behind my husband’s shop, on the Walworth Road, Vera, Min and me – well, that’s just old-fashioned. But a charming place like this…’

  She gazed appreciatively around the room – which seemed to have acquired even more flourishes since Frances had glimpsed it last, the hob grate with a bunch of paper poppies standing in it, the sofa covered in what looked like a chenille table-cloth, complete with bobbles on its hem, and the mantelpiece crowded now with postcards and ornaments: ebony elephants, brass monkeys, a china Buddha, a Spanish fan; the tambourine was there too, its ribbons trailing. ‘I was saying to the girls before you come up,’ Mrs Viney
went on warmly, ‘isn’t it wonderful to think of all the ladies that must have lived here in days gone by, in their bonnets and fine frocks? Such skirts those frocks had, didn’t they! Yards of material in them! Makes you wonder how they got on, with all the muck on the streets back then. Makes you wonder how they got up the stairs, even. As for visiting certain other little places —’

  ‘Mum!’ cried her daughters. Mrs Barber cried it loudest of all.

  Mrs Viney opened wide her button eyes. ‘What? Oh, Mrs Wray knows it’s only my fun. So does Miss Wray, I’m sure. Besides, we’re all ladies here.’

  At that the little girl began to protest that they were not all ladies; that there were boys there too. Mrs Viney, still comfortable, said, ‘Well, you know what I mean.’

  But, no, the little girl didn’t know what she meant, because Maurice wasn’t a lady, and Siddy wasn’t a lady. Siddy wasn’t even a boy yet, he was too little —

  ‘That’s enough from you, madam,’ said Vera sharply, while Frances, puzzled, thought, Siddy? The girl pushed out her grown-up mouth, but fell silent. Mrs Viney was saying again, Yes, she did think the house a fine one. ‘Such a bit of luck for Lil and Len. And hasn’t Lil done the rooms up nice! She always was the artistic one in the family. – No, Lil, you was!’ She gave Frances a wink. ‘I’m making her blush, look.’

  ‘It’s her artist’s temperament,’ said Vera, in her dry way.

  ‘Well, I don’t know which side she gets it from. Not from mine, that’s for sure! And as for her dear father, God rest him, why, he couldn’t hang a picture straight on a nail, let alone paint one —’

  Her words were broken into by an extraordinary noise, a snuffling, gurgling, animal sound, that made Frances and her mother give starts of alarm. The sisters, by contrast, grew hushed. Vera peered over the arm of the sofa into a large straw bag that was sitting beside it – a bag which Frances, all this time, had taken for a simple hold-all, but which she now realised was a carrying basket for an infant. There was a moment of suspense. The women spoke in whispers. Was he going off? Was he off? Had he gone? But then the snuffling started up again, and almost instantly exploded into a howl.