The Paying Guests (17 page)

She met his gaze as if meeting a challenge. ‘Just the one thing?’

‘Just the one.’

‘And how about when
you
land on it?’

‘When I land on it,’ he said, with his worst smirk yet, ‘well, then Lily has to take off something else.’

‘I see. And what will happen – well, if
I
land on it?’

He thought that over, or pretended to, stroking his bristly chin. ‘Now, there’s a poser. We’ve never played, you understand, with a third party… If you land on a heart, Frances, I should say – well, that Lilian ought to take off something else. Though you’d be welcome to take off something too, if you’d like to.’

As a piece of gallantry, she thought, that was rather belated – if an invitation to remove one’s clothes over a game of Snakes and Ladders could be construed as gallantry at all. But she was at the high point of drunkenness now, excited by the gin and the tobacco – excited too, despite herself, by the atmosphere of raciness and intimacy into which the little party was plunging. And the evening had started so unpromisingly! She recalled, as if from a distance, her own bad temper, Mrs Playfair, Mr Crowther —

Oh, but Mr Crowther was a wet. Fancy sitting in a twilit garden with a girl and fussing over a Siamese cat. She could have done better than that herself!

And suddenly time had made a queer leap forward and, without her quite knowing how, the game had begun. One needed a six, Leonard told her, to start, and she spent a frustrated few minutes turning up other numbers, while first he and then Lilian sent their men hopping across the board. And when she did join the game at last, she promptly landed on one of the doctored squares, one with a treble clef drawn on it, which meant she had to sing a snatch of song. She sang the first thing that came into her head; it was ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. She sang the first two lines only, and pitched the opening note so badly that the high ‘any’ came out as a tortured squeak. But Leonard applauded as if she had given an operatic solo, gripping a fresh cigarette at the side of his mouth and calling around it, as he clapped, ‘Bravo!’

The next number he spun took his counter to a square with a drawing of a flower on it. He went through a writhing, complicated pantomime while Frances and Lilian attempted to guess the flower he was representing. A daisy? A rose? It turned out to be creeping ivy – which led the three of them into a noisy argument about whether ivy could be considered to be a flower at all, or was simply a plant. He ended the debate by spinning Lilian’s number for her and swiftly hopping her man across the board. Whether he deliberately muddled the move or not, Frances wasn’t sure, but the counter went sliding down a top-hatted snake to end on one of the inky hearts.

‘No,’ Lilian said quickly, ‘that’s not fair!’

‘Yes it is. Isn’t it fair, Frances?’

‘Well —’

‘There. Frances says it’s fair; and Frances is a high-brow. I told you she cheats, Frances. She’s all promises, this one.’

Lilian put out her foot and kicked him, hard; Frances heard the crack of her heel against his shin-bone. But while he howled and clutched his leg she kept still for a moment, clearly thinking the forfeit over. Then she rose to her knees, drew off her clattering bangles and slapped them down in tipsy triumph beside the board.

Leonard cried immediately: ‘Cheat! She’s cheating again! Bracelets don’t count!’

And, ‘Cheat!’ echoed Frances. She cupped her hands around her mouth. ‘Boo! Shame!’

Lilian made a gesture as if to swat them both away. ‘Yes, they do count. They do, if creeping ivy can be a flower.’

‘Rubbish!’

‘They do!’

Reluctantly, they let their protests subside. But Leonard looked at Frances in disgust. ‘What’ll it be next time? A hair from her head?’

Lilian got hold of her drink, and the game continued. At Leonard’s next turn his counter landed on a ‘musical’ square, and that perked him up. He sang ‘Everybody’s Doing It’ – sang it in a boisterous Cockney manner, clipping his ‘g’s, hooking his thumbs into his armpits like a costermonger, finally leaning across the board to his wife and prodding her in the stomach and thighs in time to the song.

He continued to hum as the game proceeded. He drank off the last of his beer while Lilian and Frances took their turns, but Frances saw him gazing sideways down at the board as he swallowed, clearly calculating his next move. When he took hold of the spinner he gave it such a violent twist that it went cartwheeling across the floor and disappeared into the shadow of the sofa. He leapt after it, and brought it back saying, ‘Five! Most definitely five!’ And as he tripped his man forward it became clear that he had engineered the move in order to take the counter to another heart.

He looked glumly at Lilian. ‘Oh, dear.’

Frances looked at Lilian too. She had drawn down another cushion from the sofa and was hugging it to her bosom. She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Now, don’t be like that,’ he said reasonably. ‘You know the rules. I didn’t make them.’

‘Yes, you did!’

‘No, I didn’t! It was Mr… Kidd.’ He had picked up the lid of the box and was pretending to read the manufacturer’s instructions. ‘He was one of those dirty-minded Victorian so-and-sos, I expect. Yes, here it is, in black and white. “Whenever a player lands on a square marked with a heart, the lady in the room with the shadiest character must remove one of her garments.” Well, I mean to say,’ he appealed to his wife, ‘that can’t be Frances, can it?’

Lilian had been smiling at last, but at his words her smile grew fixed, and now it wavered and broke and she turned her head from him. Undeterred, he pressed on. ‘“If said lady refuses to remove one garment, as a forfeit she must remove
two
!
Bracelets not to be counted!
”’ He punched the lid with his finger, holding it up as if to display it, then whisking it away. ‘Well, we’ll be kind and let the bracelet business pass. But really, Lil, rules is rules. Come along now, play the game. You’re showing yourself up. Good heavens, you’d think she’d never undressed in front of a gentleman before, wouldn’t you, Frances? You’d think —’

‘All right,’ said Lilian sharply. She got to her feet, dropping the cushion, but then for some reason stepping on to it, moving about to get her balance. The gin seemed to have caught up with her, all of it at once. She made a lurch to the side, her heel came down hard on the carpeted boards, and her barmaidy bosom gave a bounce.

Frances thought again of her mother, trying to sleep in the room below. What time was it, anyhow? She had no idea. She looked for the clock and couldn’t find it.

Leonard, naturally, was as serious as ever – saying to his wife, in a warning way, ‘Now, remember what I said. No
hairs
, or any tricks like that. No
earrings
. No —’

‘Oh, let me alone!’ she said. She stood frowning for a moment, then came to some decision and, turning, faced the chimney-breast, putting her back to him and to Frances. The back was squarest to him, however: Frances, watching from her place by the easy chair, suddenly unable to look away, saw her lift the hem of her skirt and grope beneath it for the top of her stocking; she saw the stocking grow opaque as it was eased down over her thigh, her knee, her calf and lifted foot. By the time it was free, Leonard was whistling like a workman on the street. Lilian turned back to him and dipped an ironic, inelegant curtsy. She screwed the stocking into a ball and made as if to throw it – her stance suggesting, as her hand came up, that she was wondering, just for a second, whether to throw it at him or at Frances. She chose her husband: she threw it hard, but it unrolled as it flew. He caught it and ran it across his moustache.

‘Now,’ he said as he did it, ‘a more scrupulous fellow than me might say that, since stockings come in pairs, they ought really to count as one garment… But, hell, I’ll be generous.’

He put the stocking around his neck and began to fuss with it, trying to tie it into a bow above his ordinary collar. Lilian sat heavily back down on her cushion and tucked her skirt around her legs. But the skirt reached only to her ankles, leaving her feet illuminated baldly by the lamp; and somehow the sight of the two plump feet together like that, one of them stockinged, one of them bare, was more unsettling, more indefinably lewd, than if both had been naked. Frances kept drawing her gaze away from them, but the gaze kept creeping back. Purely to break the spell of the thing she lifted her glass, not wanting the gin at all, but recklessly drinking it down anyhow; beginning to feel a little sick as a result.

Leonard had finished the bow at his throat. He looked like a comical cat on a picture postcard. Slapping his hands together he returned to the board. ‘
Allons-y!
Whose turn is it next? Well? Frances? Is it yours?’

It was his wife’s turn, Frances knew. Probably he knew it himself. But Lilian kept to her cushion, saying nothing.

‘Perhaps we ought to put the game away now,’ Frances said.

‘Put it away?’ said Leonard. ‘You’re joking! Things are just warming up. Come on, whose turn is it? Is it yours?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘I thought as much. Let’s have you then, Lil! Don’t keep me and Frances waiting. I want my second stocking, don’t I?’

His voice jarred on Frances now. He was like a boy with a whip, trying to keep up the boisterous motion of the game. But the game seemed to be turning against him. The whole evening was turning, breaking apart on sour currents in a way she didn’t quite understand.

Lilian worked the spinner in silence. The number took her to a ladder; her counter went up it to an empty square. Then it was Frances’s turn, then Leonard’s, then Lilian’s again – the game running on without incident, though at every spin Leonard tensed, then gasped or groaned or clapped his hands to his head, like a Regency buck at the card-table watching his gold, his horse, his country estate, his entire fortune, melt away.

Then Frances’s turn came round again, and, drunk as she was, she saw at once that the number she had spun carried her counter to a square with a heart drawn on it. She said quickly, ‘I muddled that one. I’m going to spin again.’

Leonard, however, was quicker. ‘No second spins! That’s in the rules too.’ He picked up her man and moved it for her: ‘… three, four, five. Aha! Another heart! Perhaps I shall get my pair of stockings after all. What do you say, Frances?’

Lilian had drawn up her knees, and had bowed her head to meet them. Her voice was muffled by the fabric of her skirt. ‘I don’t want to play any more. You’re ganging up on me! It’s not fair!’

‘Come on!’ he cried. ‘We’re waiting. You can’t welch on us now.’

‘I don’t want to play!’ She wailed it, and when she lifted her head her face was puffed and blurry, almost ugly. She spoke like a child. ‘I’m tired. I feel giddy. You’ve made me drink too much. You always do.’

‘I like that!’ he answered. ‘There’s you and Frances been putting it away like a right pair of sozzlers —’

Oh, shut up!
thought Frances. She felt really unwell suddenly. She had changed her pose, put a hand to the floor, and found that the floor wasn’t quite where it ought to have been. She said, ‘It’s late, isn’t it? What time is it?’

‘It’s time for Lilian to get cracking!’

‘I need my bed. I feel dreadful.’

‘You need a bit more gin, that’s all. Come on, Frances. I thought you were enjoying it. Don’t you want to see the show?’

She gazed at him in muzzy disbelief. What on earth was she doing here? She knew that her room was close by, just on the other side of the wall, but she had a panicky feeling that she was far from home, among strangers. And was that a noise downstairs, a door opening and closing? She began to rise, saying, ‘Oh, God, I need to go to bed.’

He put out his hand to her. ‘Don’t do that.’ He actually gripped her, hotly, on the ankle. ‘You’re spoiling the game!’

The surprise of his touch sobered her slightly. She twisted her foot out of his grasp, then leaned unsteadily to the board. Taking hold of his wooden counter she slid it to the final square.

‘There. You’ve won. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

He looked sulky – or mock-sulky. She couldn’t tell now.

‘Well, it’s no fun like that.’

‘Hard luck. I’m tired. So’s Lilian.’

‘Oh, Lilian isn’t tired. It’s just a thing she likes to say.’ He added quietly, turning his head, ‘She’ll probably say it again later. She won’t mean it then, either.’

There was a silence after his words. He looked at his wife and said, ‘What? Oh, Frances doesn’t mind.’ The sulkiness had disappeared. He leaned back on his elbows and grinned up at Frances, all his crowded teeth on display. ‘Frances is a woman of the world – aren’t you, Frances?’

She was trying to straighten her frock. She said, without smiling, ‘I might have been once.’

He answered quickly, ‘Just the once? Still, once is all it takes – unfortunately. Ask Lil.’

His tone was so unpleasant now that, gazing down at his face, Frances had the urge, shockingly powerful, to kick him in it. Instead she turned away and began to work her feet into her shoes. ‘Whoops!’ he said, when she swayed. But it was Lilian who rose to help her. She came across the rug, her own step far from steady, her face as pinkly mottled as a plate of ham, her skirt creased like a concertina above her mismatched feet and ankles. But she offered her hand for Frances to grip; and when she spoke, her voice was kind, tired, her own.

‘I’m sorry, Frances.’

Frances saw the clock at last: it was a few minutes to midnight. Holding tight on to Lilian’s hand she was filled with a vision, a sad mirage, of the simple, pleasant few hours that the two of them, in a different world, a different life, might have spent together. Instead – what had they done? They had squandered those hours on Leonard. She hadn’t so much as gazed honestly into Lilian’s face until this moment. Instead she had cajoled and bullied her – had clapped and cheered while she took off her clothes! And she had done it, she realised now, out of some mean, malicious impulse – siding against her with her husband, in order to punish her for being his wife.

She couldn’t communicate any of this to Lilian. Shaking her head she said simply, ‘I’m sorry, too.’ She regained her balance; and Lilian’s fingers slid out of hers.