Frances reached for the book and studied the acrostic. ‘Isn’t it? And on a Sunday, too.’
She felt her mother’s level gaze. ‘Don’t imagine that I can’t tell when you are making fun of me, Frances.’
Upstairs, Mrs Barber laughed. Something light was dropped or thrown and went skittering across the boards. Frances gave up on the puzzle. ‘What do you think her background can be?’
Her mother had closed the book and was putting it aside. ‘Whose?’
She gave a jerk of her chin. ‘Mrs B’s. I should say her father’s some sort of branch manager, shouldn’t you? A mother who’s rather “nice”. “Indian Love Lyrics” on the gramophone, perhaps a brother doing well for himself in the Merchant Navy. Piano lessons for the girls. An outing to the Royal Academy once a year . . . ’ She began to yawn. Covering her mouth with the back of her wrist, she went on, through the yawn, ‘One good thing, I suppose, about their being so young: they’ve only his parents to compare us with. They won’t know that we really haven’t a clue what we’re doing. So long as we act the part of landladies with enough gusto, then landladies is what we will be.’
Her mother looked pained. ‘How baldly you put it! You might be Mrs Seaview, of Worthing.’
‘Well, there’s no shame in being a landlady; not these days. I for one aim to enjoy landladying.’
‘If you would only stop saying the word!’
Frances smiled. But her mother was plucking at the silk binding of a blanket, a look of real distress beginning to creep into her expression; she was an inch, Frances knew, from saying, ‘Oh, it would break your dear father’s heart!’ And since even now, nearly four years after his death, Frances couldn’t think of her father without wanting to grind her teeth, or swear, or leap up and smash something, she hastily turned the conversation. Her mother was involved in the running of two or three local charities: she asked after those. They spoke for a time about a forthcoming bazaar.
Once she saw her mother’s face clear, become simply tired and elderly, she got to her feet.
‘Now, have you everything you need? You don’t want a biscuit, in case you wake?’
Her mother began to arrange herself for sleep. ‘No, I don’t want a biscuit. But you may put out the light for me, Frances.’
She lifted the plaits away from her shoulders and settled her head on her pillow. Her glasses had left little bruise-like dints on the bridge of her nose. As Frances reached to the lamp there were more footsteps in the room above; and then her hazel eyes returned to the ceiling.
‘It might be Noel or John Arthur up there,’ she murmured, as the light went down.
And, yes, thought Frances a moment later, lingering in the shadowy hall, it might be; for she could smell tobacco smoke now, and hear some sort of masculine muttering up on the landing, along with the tap of a slippered male foot . . . And just like that, like a knee or an elbow receiving a blow on the wrong spot, her heart was jangling. How grief could catch one out, still! She had to stand at the foot of the stairs while the fit of sorrow ran through her. But if only, she thought, as she began to climb—she hadn’t thought it in ages—if only, if only she might turn the stair and find one of her brothers at the top—John Arthur, say, looking lean, looking bookish, looking like a whimsical monk in his brown Jaeger dressing-gown and Garden City sandals.
There was no one save Mr Barber, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his jacket off, his cuffs rolled back; he was fiddling with a nasty thing he had evidently just hung on the landing wall, a combination barometer-and-clothes-brush set with a lurid orangey varnish. But lurid touches were everywhere, she saw with dismay. It was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick. The faded carpet in her mother’s old bedroom was lost beneath pseudo-Persian rugs. The lovely pier-glass had been draped slant-wise with a fringed Indian shawl. A print on one of the walls appeared to be a Classical nude in the Lord Leighton manner. The wicker birdcage twirled slowly on a ribbon from a hook that had been screwed into the ceiling; inside it was a silk-and-feather parrot on a papier-mâché perch.
The landing light was turned up high, hissing away as if furious. Frances wondered if the couple had remembered that she and her mother were paying for that. Catching Mr Barber’s eye, she said, in a voice to match the dreadful brightness all around them, ‘Got everything straight, have you?’
He took the cigarette out of his mouth, stifling a yawn. ‘Oh, I’ve had enough of it for one day, Miss Wray. I did my bit, bringing up those blessed boxes. I leave the titivating to Lilian. She loves all that sort of thing. She can titivate for England, she can.’
Frances hadn’t really looked at him properly before. She’d absorbed his manner, his ‘theme’—that facetious grumbling—rather than anything more tangible, more physical. Now, in the flat landing light, she took in the clerkly neatness of him. Without his shoes he was only an inch or two taller than she. ‘Puny,’ his wife had called him; but there was too much life in him for that. His face was textured with gingery stubble and with little pimple scars, his jaw was narrow, his teeth slightly crowded, his eyes had sandy, near-invisible lashes. But the eyes themselves were very blue, and they somehow made him handsome, or almost-handsome—more handsome, anyhow, than she had realised so far.
She looked away from him. ‘Well, I’m off to bed.’
He fought down another yawn. ‘Lucky you! I think Lily’s still decorating ours.’
‘I’ve put out the lights downstairs. The mantle in the hall has a bit of a trick to it, so I thought I’d better do it. I ought to have shown you, I suppose.’
He said helpfully, ‘Show me now, if you like.’
‘Well, my mother’s trying to sleep. Her room, you know, is just at the bottom of the stairs—’
‘Ah. Show me tomorrow, then.’
‘I will. I’m afraid it’ll be dark, though, if you or Mrs Barber need to go down again tonight.’
‘Oh, we’ll find our way.’
‘Take a lamp, perhaps.’
‘That’s an idea, isn’t it? Or, I tell you what.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll send Lil down first, on a rope. Any trouble and she can . . . give me a tug.’
He kept his gaze on hers as he spoke, in a playful sort of way. But there was something to his manner, something vaguely unsettling. She hesitated about replying and he raised his cigarette, turning his head to take a puff of it, twisting his mouth out of its smile to direct away the smoke; but still holding her gaze with those lively blue eyes of his.
Then, with a blink, his manner changed. The door to his bedroom was drawn open and his wife appeared. She had a picture in her hands—another Lord Leighton nude, Frances feared it was—and the sight of it brought on one of his mock-complaints.
‘Are you still at it, woman? Blimey O’Reilly!’
She gave Frances a smile. ‘I’m only making things look nice.’
‘Well, poor Miss Wray wants to go to bed. She’s come to complain about the noise.’
Her face fell. ‘Oh, Miss Wray, I’m so sorry!’
Frances said quickly, ‘You haven’t been noisy at all. Mr Barber is teasing.’
‘I meant to save it all for tomorrow. But now I’ve started, I can’t stop.’
The landing felt impossibly crowded to Frances with them all standing there like that. Would the three of them have to meet, exchange pleasantries, every night? ‘You must take as long as you need,’ she said in her false, bright way. ‘At least—’ She’d begun to move towards her door, but paused. ‘You will remember, won’t you, about my mother, in the room downstairs?’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Mrs Barber. And, ‘Of course we will,’ echoed her husband, in apparent earnestness.
Frances wished she’d said nothing. With an awkward ‘Well, good night,’ she let herself into her room. She left the door ajar for a moment while she lit her bedroom candle, and as she
closed it she saw Mr Barber, puffing on his cigarette, looking across the landing at her; he smiled and moved away.
Once the door was shut and the key turned softly in the lock, she began to feel better. She kicked off her slippers, took off her blouse, her skirt, her underthings and stockings . . . and at last, like a portly matron letting out the laces of her stays, she was herself again. Raising her arms in a stretch, she looked around the shadowy room. How beautifully calm and uncluttered it was! The mantelpiece had two silver candlesticks on it and nothing else. The bookcase was packed but tidy, the floor dark with a single rug; the walls were pale—she’d removed the paper and used a white distemper instead. Even the framed prints were unbusy: a Japanese interior, a Friedrich landscape, the latter just visible in the candle-light, a series of snowy peaks dissolving into a violet horizon.
With a yawn, she felt for the pins in her hair and pulled them free. She filled her bowl with water, ran a flannel over her face, around her neck and under her arms; she cleaned her teeth, rubbed Vaseline into her cheeks and ruined hands. And then, because all this time she’d been able to smell Mr Barber’s cigarette and the scent was making her restless, she opened the drawer of her nightstand and brought out a packet of papers and a tin of tobacco. She rolled a neat little fag, lit it by the flame of her candle, climbed into bed with it, then blew the candle out. She liked to smoke like this, naked in the cool sheets, with only the hot red tip of a cigarette to light her fingers in the dark.
Tonight, of course, the room was not quite dark: light was leaking in from the landing, a thin bright pool of it beneath her door. What were they doing out there now? She could hear the murmur of their voices. They were debating where to hang the wretched picture—were they? If they started banging in a nail she would have to go and say something. If they left the landing light burning so furiously she’d have to say something, too. She began trying out phrases in her head.
I’m sorry to have to raise this matter—
Do you remember we discussed—?
Perhaps we might—
It might be best if—
I’m afraid I made a mistake.
No, she wouldn’t think that! It was too late for that. It was—oh, years and years too late for that.
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