The Paying Guests (29 page)

‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Yes, I expect you’re right.’

She said it with an air of finality, hoping to put an end to the conversation – which had drawn, she thought, perilously close to the old upset over Christina.

Or, then again, she wondered as she returned to her mending, had it? Wasn’t it more like the conversations she could remember having with her mother in her teens, about the school-friends and the neighbours’ daughters over whom she’d regularly grown so embarrassingly romantic? ‘Gordon will think he has a rival,’ she recalled her mother saying once, with an awkward laugh, here in this very room. Gordon Fowler had been engaged to Mrs Playfair’s daughter Kate; Frances had rather idolised Kate when she was fourteen or so. Her mother must be imagining now that she had some sort of crush on Lilian. She was warning her – was she? Was she looking into the future, seeing disappointments, tears? She couldn’t guess, then, how dizzyingly far beyond a crush Frances and Lilian had already travelled. What would she think, what would she do, if she could picture them as they had been a few hours before, Frances sprawled on the sitting-room carpet, Lilian’s mouth between her legs?

The idea brought with it a rush of something startlingly like triumph; but the feeling immediately began to change, began to shrivel and grow dark. For what, Frances asked herself, had she and Lilian done? They had allowed this passion into the house: she saw it for the first time as something unruly, something almost with a life of its own. It might have been a fugitive that the two of them had smuggled in by night, then hidden away in the attic or in the spaces behind the walls.

Turning down the gas in the hall at bedtime, hearing the creak of Lilian’s ironing board in the little kitchen, she said to herself, I won’t go in to her. Just this once, I won’t go in. She climbed the stairs, meaning to go straight to her room and close the door. But as she left the final step she hesitated; and then, without another thought, she went softly around the stairwell to the open kitchen doorway. She and Lilian met each other’s gaze, and her heart turned over. She stole further into the room.

Lilian set the iron on its trivet and looked nervously past her to the landing. ‘I thought you were never going to come! I’ve been here ages, pressing the same pillow-case over and over. You don’t hate me, do you?’

‘Hate you?’

‘I thought, earlier on – Oh, I’ve been thinking all sorts of things.’

They touched hands across the board; then she caught up the iron again. The sitting-room door had opened and, with a whistle, here came Leonard.

He was dressed for the heat – or rather, undressed for it, with his feet bare, and his sleeves rolled high, and his collarless shirt flapping at the throat, giving a glimpse of the white vest beneath it and a suggestion of the gingery chest beneath that. The bruises around his eyes, which over the past four weeks had paled from bluish-black to khaki, had now all but faded; he seemed his old self, bouncing with health. He had a bottle of beer in his hand, and took a last swig from it as he entered the kitchen.

He greeted Frances quite cheerily, moving past her in a fox-trot. He seemed to have wandered in for no particular reason, and she hoped that he would now go wandering off again. Instead he lingered, nosing about, watching Lilian at work on the pillow-slip. ‘Are you going to be much longer at that?’

She answered self-consciously. ‘It has to be done.’

His tone became faintly wheedling. ‘Finish it tomorrow, can’t you?’

She slid the iron across the cloth and made no reply. But still he watched, still he hovered, still he mooched about. He didn’t look at Frances again. There was no hostility in his manner. He wanted his wife, that was all – she realised it with a pang. He didn’t know – how could he? – that she wanted her too.

The thought made her step away and go across to her own room. Opening the door, she found that Lilian had slipped one of her notes underneath: a heart, with an arrow piercing it. She stared at the scrap of paper then put it aside, face down.

By the time she had undressed, and got into bed, and smoked her cigarette, Lilian and Leonard had left the kitchen and one of them was shutting off the gas on the landing; a moment later there came the soft click of their closing bedroom door. Frances had heard that click every night for the past three months, but something about the sound, tonight, unsettled her. She shifted around, over-warm despite the open window, now and then lifting her head from her pillow, thinking that she could hear murmurs, creaks, laughter, from across the landing… There was nothing.

When she and Lilian saw each other the following morning they agreed that, in future, they would take more care. They would keep to Frances’s room, they said, where they could hear the garden door if it sounded, as well as the front one, and for a week they were very cautious, meeting only when the house was empty, and the rest of the time wringing a terrible excitement from chance encounters on the landing, catching at each other’s hands as they passed on the stairs. Frances went to her mother and said that she’d been thinking things over and, yes, she had been letting herself grow a little slack. Were there any charity tasks she could help with? What about those raffle tickets? There turned out to be five hundred of them: she spent an afternoon inking in the numbers, and then another afternoon going round the local houses, trying to cajole people into buying them. A part of her enjoyed it. Even the separation from Lilian: a part of her enjoyed that. She remembered the airless feeling she’d had in the gaudy sitting-room.

But at night, in the darkness, she’d find herself lifting her head, listening out for the sound of that closing bedroom door. And the next time she and Lilian made love there was some new quality to it. They stripped naked, but nakedness somehow wasn’t enough any more: she wanted to get past Lilian’s skin, possess her, with her hands, her lips, her tongue… Afterwards they lay breathless, shaken by the thud of their hearts, pressed together so tightly that she wasn’t sure which of the beats were Lilian’s, which her own. When she began to ease herself free, Lilian caught hold of her. ‘Don’t let go of me! Never let go!’

But once the thud had calmed and Lilian’s grip on her had slackened, her mood began to cloud. She thought of how she would lie here later, with only a ghost in her arms; how she would listen for that closing door. She had never asked what went on beyond it. She had never wanted to know. It had seemed something that didn’t concern her, something that scarcely concerned Lilian. Now, suddenly, not knowing was impossible to bear.

She drew a breath. ‘Lilian, when you’re with Leonard – Is it like this, with him?’

Lilian was still for a second, then rolled away from her. ‘Oh, Frances, don’t ask me. I don’t want to think about him when I’m with you. The things I do with him – There was love in it once, at the start. But it’s never been like it is with you. With you, it’s all of me. With him —’

‘How often do you do it?’

‘Don’t
ask
me, Frances.’ She put a hand across her eyes.

‘I’d rather know than not know, that’s all. How often?’

She answered uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. Not so often any more. He knows I don’t want to.’

‘He knows you don’t want to, yet he still makes you do it? What is he? – a brute?’

‘It isn’t like that.’

‘You
do
want it, then.’

‘No! I hate it. You don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to be married. If I didn’t let him, ever – It’s different for men. If I stopped letting him he’d want to know why, he’d pester me, he’d make scenes. He might get suspicious. It would make things harder for you and me. He already wonders why you want to see so much of me.’

The thought made Frances feel ill. ‘It seems… obscene,’ she said. ‘People like me get called obscene, but – You might as well charge him by the hour. At least that would be being honest about it.’

Lilian rolled back to her. ‘Oh, please don’t spoil things. It’s been so lovely. It’s been perfect. Hasn’t it been perfect for you?’

‘Yes,’ Frances admitted, ‘it has. But —’

‘But what?’

‘Well, it’s been perfect in the way that something’s perfect when it’s under a glass dome, or trapped in amber. We do nothing but embrace. We do nothing but lie in rooms with the curtains closed, like this.’

‘But how could we ever do anything else?’

‘When we talk, we talk nonsense. Of flying carpets. Of gipsy queens. You mean more to me than that. I don’t want a make-believe life with you. I want – I don’t know what I want. I almost wish I were a man. I’ve never wished it before. But if I were a man I could take you dancing, take you to supper —’

‘If you were a man,’ said Lilian, ‘you wouldn’t be able to do any of that. Len would hear of it, and come and fight you. People would say all sorts of things against me. You don’t want to be a man, do you? I wouldn’t love you if you were. You wouldn’t be you, then. Dancing and suppers – what do they matter? I’ve done them over and over, and they mean nothing.
This
means something.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘It means we’re in love.’

‘But tonight you’ll lie with him, and I’ll be here, thinking of you doing it. I mind it more and more. I didn’t, at first. Or I told myself that I didn’t. Don’t you mind it, too?’

Lilian lowered her gaze. When she answered, it was in a queer, dead tone that Frances had never heard her use before. ‘I mind it every minute.’

‘Then why not… leave him?’

She looked up. ‘What?’

‘Just walk away from him.’

‘Oh, Frances, how could I do that?’

‘Are you in love with him?’

‘You know I’m not.’

‘Then make an end of it.’

‘Stop it, Frances. Where would I go? How would I live?’

‘You might… live with me.’

Neither of them had ever suggested such a thing before, and Lilian looked startled. But at once, her expression changed. ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful!’

‘No,’ said Frances, catching hold of her, ‘don’t say it like that. As if it’s another fairy tale. Why shouldn’t we live together? We could find a flat, like Christina and Stevie’s. We could take a room, just one room —’ She could see the room already. She could see the two of them inside it, and herself locking the door. ‘We could pig it, go naked, live on bread and scrape if we had to. Why shouldn’t we?’

‘But Len would never let me.’

‘How could he stop you?’

‘And what about your mother?’

‘I don’t know. But there must be a way. Mustn’t there? If we really wanted it?’

Their hearts had begun to thud again. They looked at each other, and for a second they seemed on the verge of some dizzying plunge or leap.

But then Lilian closed her eyes and spoke lightly and longingly. ‘Oh, but wouldn’t it be lovely! We could have a wedding night! My proper wedding night was awful. There seemed no point in going to a hotel or anything like that. We went straight to Cheveney Avenue; you could hear Len’s parents through the walls. Len kept whistling “At Trinity Church I Met My Doom”. He whistled it so much he made me cry. He said he was sorry afterwards, but – Ours wouldn’t be like that, would it? Where would we have it? Paris! An artist’s attic, looking over the rooftops!’

In other words, thought Frances, they were back in the realm of fantasy, and might just as well be talking about gipsy caravans. She felt a surge of relief, disappointment – she wasn’t sure what the feeling was. But with an effort, she let it go. They lay together a little longer, until it was time for them to rise, and dress, and return to their chores.

And what, really, did she want? She wanted Lilian, obviously. Further than that, she had never allowed her thoughts to venture. But now the vision she had had – the room, the freedom, the dizzying leap – it was in her head, small, small as a mustard seed, but taking root. Was it possible? Could they do it? Could they make a future together? Could she walk away from her mother, from the Champion Hill life that she had built up so sedulously, one dusty bit of housework at a time? And could she seriously ask Lilian to give up a
marriage
?

No, of course she couldn’t. It was madness even to consider it. She had to remember what she’d told Christina: that the affair was glorious, a gift, to be enjoyed as long as it lasted. Surely it would run its course. Probably it was simply a thing of the summer, that she and Lilian would outgrow… But another week passed, and then another. The August days kept warm, but began to be noticeably shorter. And the affair did not cool, did not run its course. On the contrary, it became ever more tearing, ever more consuming, ever more frustrating. For there, like a brick wall in the way of it, like a briar hedge – there was Leonard. The two of them could kiss and make love as fiercely as they dared during the day, but at the end of it – at every end, of every day – Lilian would go into her bedroom with him, the door would close behind them, and – Frances still shrank from picturing what happened after that. She took comfort from the fact that the couple seemed to argue more regularly now; that they sometimes passed entire evenings in a dead or bristling silence. But what a way, she thought, to have to find one’s comfort! And in any case, the arguments were always made up. The silences would give way to yawns, to murmurs, to laughter. There were still trips to dancing-halls and public-houses. There was even to be a holiday: Lilian announced it miserably. At the beginning of September she and Leonard were going to Hastings for a week with Charlie and Betty. A whole week! How would they bear it?

Worse even than the thought of it, however, worse than the laughter and the dancing-halls, worse than anything, were the routine casual intimacies of married life: Leonard waiting for Lilian at the bottom of the stairs, calling, ‘Come on, woman!’; Lilian straightening the angle of his hat, doing up the buckle at the back of his waistcoat – little husband-and-wifely moments which Frances might glimpse or overhear as she made her way through the house, and which, if she came upon them unreadied, could strike at her like blows to the heart. At first she did her best to turn and walk away from them. Increasingly, as the month wore to a close, she found herself seized by a pointless impulse to interrupt them. She’d invent trivial domestic dramas, find any sort of excuse – reels of thread, needles, books, that must be urgently borrowed or returned – anything, anything at all to get hold of Lilian, get her by herself, away from Leonard, even for a minute.