The Paying Guests (34 page)

‘I was frightened that it had,’ said Frances.

‘Well, you don’t sound very happy that it hasn’t.’

‘No. I —’

But what could she say? She was ashamed, she realised. She longed to speak, to unburden herself; she remembered the bond she had felt with Christina at the music hall. She could find no trace of it now. There was merely the old scratchiness – that bit of cinder in the soap. So they talked of stupid, pointless things. She stayed for less than twenty minutes, and wished she hadn’t come at all.

But before she left she looked around the room, that was so full of Christina and Stevie. She and Lilian would have a room like it, once this horrible thing was done.

And when, half an hour later, seated on a bench in Cavendish Square, she spotted Lilian herself, hurrying across the garden towards her, she felt a jolt of uncomplicated love in her heart, simply at seeing her, there, among strangers. She looked flushed, damp, pleased. She joined Frances beneath the umbrella and spoke breathlessly.

‘I thought I’d never get here in time! The shop turned out not to be right after all. The man sent me to another, on the Charing Cross Road. He was awful about it. He acted as though I was on the streets or something. I kept my gloves off, to show my ring; he made me feel it had come off a curtain! But it doesn’t matter. The second man was all right. And I got them. Look.’

She began to unclasp her bag. Frances glanced around in alarm. But the light was poor, people were hurrying because of the rain, vehicles were loud on the wet roads: it felt oddly intimate under the silk of the umbrella. Lilian opened the bag just enough to reveal the buff-coloured packet inside it. Frances saw a poorly printed label:
Dr Ridley’s Pills, for the Treatment of Female Irregularities
.

She could hardly believe that such a thing was for sale in a West-End chemist’s, in 1922. It looked like something that belonged in a museum of medical curiosities alongside a two-headed baby and a leech jar. The pills themselves, she discovered when Lilian discreetly exposed them, were hard and fibrous, and smelt pungent, like a bad sort of mint. ‘But they have to make them nasty,’ reasoned Lilian, ‘don’t they? Otherwise nobody’d believe that they do any good.’

All in the cover of her open handbag, she tipped one of the pills into her gloved palm and gazed at it with distaste. Then she made to lift it to her lips.

Frances, aghast, caught hold of her wrist. ‘You aren’t going to take one right now?’

She said, ‘I have to. You have to take some for three days, then all the rest on the fourth.’

‘No, don’t do it here. Not here, not yet.’

It was altogether too real, there, with a tooting taxi-cab going by, and ordinary red and white motor-buses snorting their way up and down Oxford Street.

But Lilian still had the pill in her palm. ‘I have to, Frances,’ she said again. And while Frances watched, she tightened her lips and sucked in her cheeks, working up the saliva in her mouth; then she popped the evil-looking pill on to her tongue and, with a grimace, quickly swallowed.

Frances kept her eyes on her face. ‘How do you feel?’

She took a breath. ‘I feel better for having started. But nothing will happen for ages yet.’ She folded the buff packet and tucked it deep down in her bag. ‘I’ll take another one before I go to bed tonight, and another when I get up; and if we’re lucky, maybe something will happen tomorrow.’

She said the same thing the next morning, and all through the whole of that day. She remained confident, calm; it was Frances who was anxious, scrutinising her face whenever the two of them were together, looking for signs of illness in it, and, when they had to be apart, hovering at the foot of the stairs, listening out for anything odd. ‘How funny you are,’ Lilian said. ‘You’re worse than a man. If you were a wife, you’d know it was nothing. How do you think other women do it?’

‘I don’t care about other women. I care only about you. Suppose you should faint, or —’

‘I won’t faint. I didn’t last time. Just be patient.’

That was on the Wednesday evening, before Leonard returned from work. And the following morning she came to Frances looking pale but excited. Something was happening, she said. She had an ache, low down in her hips. Her bowels were looser than they ought to be, and, in wiping herself in the lavatory, she’d discovered a ‘show’. The only worry now was that it might come out too soon, in which case Leonard might be home when it happened, and she’d have to explain it to him as either a heavy kind of ordinary monthly, or an actual miss… Frances held her hands and kissed her; at the same time, she was shrinking away. She couldn’t believe that in the space of a day or two her life had taken such a swerve, undergone such a narrowing, become this morbid stalking of Lilian’s insides, this monitoring of blood and bowels.

But by late afternoon, Lilian’s manner was less sure. The ‘show’ had dried up, the ache had diminished, and she had begun to feel queasy. In the middle of chopping meat for Len’s dinner she’d had to rush to the sink and retch; she couldn’t remember that from last time. She wanted to try a hot bath. But the bath would have to be almost scalding, she said, to do any good, and Frances’s mother was at home; they dared not risk being seen heating up kettles of water. They sat together in her sitting-room and she fidgeted, her hand at her stomach.

‘Isn’t it awful to think of that little egg inside me, doing its best to stay in there while I’m doing everything I can to get it out? Come on, little egg.’ She was willing it out of her womb. ‘You don’t want to stay in me. I’d be a bad, bad mother. Fly away to someone else. Fly away to some poor woman who wants a baby and can’t have one. Fly away! Now!’

She raised her arm on the final word, making a fist of her hand; and then she thumped herself, hard, in the belly.

Frances flinched. ‘God! Don’t.’

She did it again, harder than before.

‘Don’t!’ said Frances. ‘Please! I can’t bear it!’

‘Well, I’ve got to do something! I can’t just sit here. Oh, why won’t your mother go out? I’m sure a bath would do it, if it was only hot enough. Isn’t there somewhere you can take her?’

‘I don’t want you to bathe like that on your own. You might pass out. You might drown!’

‘There must be something I can do.’ She thought it over, then got to her feet. ‘I’m going to take more of the pills.’

‘No,’ said Frances, rising too. ‘I won’t let you. They’ve made you ill enough already.’

‘They’ve got to make me a lot iller than this.’

‘Please don’t. Lilian, please!’

But Lilian was already on her way to her bedroom, and by the time Frances had joined her she had retrieved the buff-coloured packet from a drawer and was tipping out its contents. Frances saw two or three or possibly even more of the filthy-looking pills go tumbling into her hand and get shovelled into her mouth. She saw Lilian screw up her face as the pills went down.

She looked pale again as she made her way to bed that night, and when Frances saw her on the Friday morning, just after Leonard had left for work, it was immediately obvious that something had changed. Her face now was the colour of dough, and her hair was sticking to her forehead; she came shuffling out of her bedroom like a weak old lady. She had been woken in the night, she said, by awful pains. She felt as though someone had given her a kick in the stomach. She’d been lying there for hours, not wanting to tell Len. But there was still no bleeding, and that was bothering her.

Frances didn’t care about the bleeding. She was too alarmed by the ghastliness of Lilian’s appearance. She hurried her back into the bedroom, lit a fire in the grate. She filled a kettle in the little kitchen, made tea and a hot water bottle.

‘I’ll go down in a moment,’ she whispered, as she handed the bottle over. Already there were sounds of movement downstairs. ‘But once I’ve seen to the stove I’ll come back. I’ll tell my mother that you’re ill, that you need someone to sit with you —’

But, ‘No,’ said Lilian, hugging the bottle to her belly. ‘No, you mustn’t do that. I don’t want your mother to think I’m ill. She might want to come and see me, and I’d be so guilty and ashamed. And she’d be bound to say something to Len.’

‘But I can’t leave you!’

‘Yes, you can. Just come up now and then.’

‘Well, drink your tea, at least. I’ll bring you a breakfast.’

She screwed up her face at the thought. ‘No, I don’t want any breakfast, I’ll be sick. I’ve had some aspirin, and that’ll help. Just let me be, Frances.’

‘I’ll come up as often as I can, then. But if you start to feel really bad —’

‘I won’t.’

‘But if you do, you’ll call me, won’t you? Never mind about my mother.’

Lilian nodded, her eyes closed. Frances kissed her, and, feeling the coolness of her cheek, she unhooked Leonard’s dressing-gown from the back of the door; she left her sitting on the side of the bed with the gown draped round her like a cloak. But even before she had reached the bottom of the stairs, she heard the creak of the ceiling. Lilian was up on her feet and walking about, going now from the door to the window, now from the window back to the door, like a prisoner in a cell, desperately pacing.

After that, the day seemed to stretch and grow endless, to become taut as a jangling nerve. Frances slipped upstairs as often as she dared, to find Lilian still white in the face, and still pacing. She wouldn’t stop moving, she said, until the bleeding had started; late in the morning she began shifting furniture about, picking up chairs, setting them down, lifting the treadle sewing-machine. The creaks and the bumps seemed to sound right through the house; at last even Frances’s mother commented on them. Frances, her heart fluttering, told her that Lilian was doing some out-of-season spring cleaning.

In the middle of the afternoon, however, all sounds of movement ceased. Apprehensively, Frances climbed the stairs, to find Lilian on the sitting-room sofa, lying propped against cushions with a blanket over her knees, and looking so like an ordinary invalid that the sight of her, just for a moment, was reassuring. Then she went closer, and saw her face. It was more doughy than ever – colourless, faintly swollen beneath a tight upper layer of skin, and with a sheen of unhealthy-looking moisture across it. She didn’t protest against Frances’s having come up to see her. Instead she put out her hand, saying, ‘Oh, Frances, it’s awful!’ She gripped Frances’s fingers and shut her eyes tight, evidently bracing herself against cramping pain.

Frances was horrified. ‘This can’t be right! I’ve got to get you a doctor.’

But at that, Lilian’s eyes flew open. ‘No, a doctor mustn’t see me! He’ll know what I’ve done! Just keep hold of my hand. Don’t let go. The bleeding’s started, that’s all. It’s bad, but –
Oh!
’ She grew rigid as the pain mounted, and held the stiffened pose for what seemed an impossibly long time; Frances saw tiny beads of sweat appear on her brow and top lip. When at last her limbs began to loosen, she sank back against the sofa cushions, wiping her face, and panting. ‘It’s all right. I’m all right.’

Frances had grown rigid, and then slack, along with her. ‘Surely it oughtn’t to be so bad? You look dreadful, Lilian.’

That made her weakly turn her face away. ‘Don’t look at me.’

‘I didn’t mean that. But you’re as pale as death.’

‘It’s worse some times than others. That was a bad one, that’s all.’ She stirred uncomfortably, raising one of her hips, sliding a hand beneath the seat of her skirt. ‘The blood keeps coming. I’m afraid of it getting on the couch. There’s nothing there, is there?’

Frances looked. ‘No, there’s nothing.’

‘I’ve got through three napkins already. I’ve been putting them on the fire. But it’s still only blood, not the proper thing. You can tell when that comes out. It’s hasn’t come yet. It’s no good till it does.’

Her voice had a new, fretful note to it, and her eyes seemed glazed. It crossed Frances’s mind that she might be feverish. She rested a hand on her damp forehead; but the forehead was chill, if anything. Was that a good sign, or a bad? She didn’t know. She didn’t know! Her own uselessness appalled her. How could she have allowed this to happen? What on earth had she been thinking? How could she possibly have let Lilian do this reckless, reckless thing —

Already Lilian was stiffening against another wave of pain, moving her feet beneath the blanket. ‘Oh, it’s starting again.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Just hold my hand.’

‘Isn’t there something I can get you, to help you bear it?’

But Lilian wasn’t listening. Her eyes were closed, her features contorted. ‘Oh, it’s worse than ever this time! Oh, Frances!
Oh!
’ She was doubled up with the pain, nearly twisting Frances’s fingers from their sockets.

Frances couldn’t bear to do nothing. She pulled herself free, ran to her bedroom, looked in her bedside cabinet for more aspirin. All she found was a bottle of kaolin and morphine: she held the brown bottle up to the light. There was a solid chalky block at the base of it, with an inch or two of fluid above; the fluid, she thought, was more or less pure morphine. It was better than nothing, surely? She hurried to the kitchen for a spoon, then ran back to the sitting-room. Lilian was still doubled up, and her cheeks were wet with tears. She didn’t ask what the medicine was. She took three spoonfuls, like an obedient child, then lay back against the cushions with tightly closed eyes.

And the morphine must have eased the pain a little, for after a few minutes her face grew less clenched. She parted her lips and let out her breath in a long, uneven sigh.

Frances thought of her mother, calmly writing letters downstairs. If she knew what was happening here, if she knew what Lilian had done —

Lilian was watching her. ‘This is too awful, Frances. You must go back down.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I want you to, though. And your mother will wonder where you are. She’ll want her tea.’

She was right, Frances realised. It was well after four. But the thought of having to go and set cups on saucers, arrange bread and butter on a plate, was horrible – grotesque!

‘I can’t leave you,’ she said.