The Paying Guests (19 page)

‘We get along all right, really.’

‘You never seem to, to me.’

‘That’s just what husbands and wives are like. You can’t expect love and romance and things like that from a marriage, can you?’

‘Can’t you? What’s the point of it, then? You and Leonard must have loved each other once, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Yes, I expect we did.’

‘You don’t sound at all convinced. Why did you marry, if you weren’t sure?’

Lilian was rolling the tip of her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray. She frowned at it. ‘You asked me that once before. Why do you mind so much?’

‘I don’t know. I’m simply trying to understand, I suppose.’

‘Well, it isn’t worth your thinking about. It was just… a mistake. It was all a mistake.’

‘A mistake?’

‘Yes, Len and I made a mistake, when we were young. We did something silly, and now we’re paying for it, that’s all.’ Her tone had grown uneasy. But looking up, seeing the perplexity on Frances’s face, she spoke almost with exasperation. ‘Oh, Frances, for somebody so clever you can be awfully dull sometimes. Don’t you know the sort of mistake I mean? I was going to have a baby. That’s why Len and I married.’ She dropped her gaze again. ‘My baby died when it was born, you see.’

Frances, shocked, said, ‘Lilian. I’m so sorry.’

She had begun biting her lip. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Of course it matters.’

‘It seems ages ago now.’

‘I had no idea. I wish I’d known.’

‘You won’t tell your mother, will you?’

‘Well, of course I won’t.’

‘And it doesn’t make you think badly of me? That Len and I did that?’

‘Oh, do you really think it could?’

Lilian’s expression cleared. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘But you’re not like other people. Len’s parents, for instance. They said one hard thing after another. That I’d fallen for the baby on purpose, as a way of getting hold of Len – as if he’d had nothing to do with it! That the baby was some other man’s, not his. And then, when my baby died, they said it was a judgement on me. Oh, it was all so horrible, Frances. It made me go a bit mad, I think. It made an evil person of me. I couldn’t look at other women’s babies. I couldn’t even be kind to Maurice, Netta’s little boy. She’s never forgiven me for it. Nobody understood. They said I ought to think of all the men who’d been killed in the War, and the people who’d died of the influenza, and what did one little baby boy matter, against all that… I suppose they were right.’

‘No,’ said Frances, ‘they weren’t. Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don’t you?’

Lilian hesitated, then nodded, and answered in a murmur. ‘Yes.’

‘And have you never thought of – of trying for another child?’

She looked away. ‘Len would like to. But what I always wonder is, what if it were to happen again? It did for my mother. I don’t think I could stand it. And then, it isn’t a nice world to bring babies into. But probably I will, in the end. It’s against nature not to, isn’t it? And if I don’t – well, then it means that Len and I will have married for nothing. It isn’t so bad, after all.’ She spoke as if trying to convince herself. ‘Len’s a good husband, really. Everybody tells me he’s a good husband. It’s just that – well, you saw how he was last night. In the days when we were courting, he pushed and pushed me into saying yes to him. And then I did say yes to him; and it’s as though he’s never forgiven me.’

‘He doesn’t ever… mistreat you?’

That brought the ghost of a smile to her face. ‘No! I’d like to see him try. And he knows my sisters would skin him alive.’

‘And he never – with other women —’ Frances was thinking of that moment, weeks before, in the starlit garden, Leonard’s hand in the small of her back.

But, ‘Oh, no,’ said Lilian. ‘He fancies himself as a bit of a ladies’ man, but he wouldn’t ever do anything about it. He learnt his lesson with me, you see.’

Her features sank as she said this, and she looked almost plain. She looked older, too, with shadows and creases around her eyes. Frances said again, ‘I’m so sorry, Lilian.’

But that made her hang her head as if ashamed.

‘You’ve always been so kind to me, Frances. Right from the start you’ve been kind. And you were honest with me, that time —’ She faltered. ‘You know the time I mean. You didn’t have to be honest with me, but you were; and I wasn’t kind in return. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.’

Frances didn’t answer. From beyond the open window there came again those distant domestic noises: a barking dog, a calling woman, a spoon being tapped against a sink. The curtains rippled in the breeze, shifting on their rings with a scrape of metal, and once they had settled back into place the room seemed dimmer than before.

And perhaps the dimness made it easier for Lilian to speak. As she crushed out her cigarette she said quietly, ‘What you told me that time —’

‘I oughtn’t to have said anything,’ said Frances, adding her own cigarette stub to the ashtray, then moving the ashtray aside.

‘Was it true, though, what you said? A love affair with a girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘There wasn’t a man?’

‘No, there wasn’t a man. There never has been a man, for me. It seems I haven’t the – the man microbe, or whatever it is one needs. My poor mother’s convinced that there must be one in me somewhere. She’s done everything to shake it loose save turn me upside down by my heels. But —’

‘But how did it begin? How did you know?’

‘I fell in love. How does anyone know that?’

‘But where did you meet?’

‘My friend and I? We met in Hyde Park, in the War. I had gone there with Noel, to listen to the speakers. It was just before conscription came in, and a man was speaking against it. He was being heckled and jostled by the crowd; it was shameful, horrible. But there, going calmly about, handing out pamphlets on his behalf and looking as though she wouldn’t care if someone spat in her face because of it, was a small, slight, fair-haired girl in a velvet tam-o’-shanter… I took a pamphlet, and went to a meeting – I had to lie to my parents about it – and there she was again. She didn’t remember me from Hyde Park, though I remembered her. After the meeting I walked her home, all the way from Victoria to Upper Holloway. In the perishing cold, too! I think I began to be in love with her by the time we crossed the Euston Road. We started to be friends. She stayed here, often. And then, suddenly, she loved me.’

‘But weren’t you shocked?’

‘That someone should love me? I was astounded.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘I know you didn’t. No, I wasn’t shocked. The whole thing was too marvellous. There had been romances in my schooldays – but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect’s eyes… This wasn’t like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up. Well, we thought ourselves grown-up. But the War did make young people wiser, didn’t it? John Arthur had already died by then. Christina – my friend – had lost cousins. We were impatient. We had – oh, such energy! We began to want to live together. We planned it, seriously. We did everything seriously in those days. Christina took typewriting and book-keeping classes. We looked at rooms, we saved our money. Our parents thought it a nonsense, of course. Then they made it into a fight – endless, exhausting, the same quarrel over and over, how could we think of leaving home, how would it look, we were too young, people would suppose us fast, no man would ever want to marry us. But even the quarrels were thrilling, in their way. Christina and I talked as though we were part of a new society! Everything was changing. Why shouldn’t we change too? We wanted to shake off tradition, caste, all that…’

She paused, and took a sip of water, feeling the scratch of her throat. Lilian was watching her. ‘Then what happened?’

She set the glass down with a chink. ‘Oh, then we got into that scrape with the police, when I threw my shoes at that MP. My father threatened to send me away. I’m afraid I laughed in his face. But my mother —’ She drew a breath. ‘My mother went through my things, and found a letter from Christina, and read it. I think she’d known all along that the friendship had something queer about it. She took the letter to Chrissy’s parents. They turned out Chrissy’s room, and found letters from me. Well, it was clear what the letters meant. I ended up with most of the blame, perhaps because I was a little older. They made me out to be some sort of vampire —’

‘Vampire!’

‘You know what I mean. One of those women, neurotic schoolmistresses and so on, who get written about in books. They talked of sending me to a doctor – to get my glands examined, they said. – Oh, I can’t bear to think of it now.’ She shuddered, remembering a scene, like something from a frightful dream, her father’s stillness, his silence, the cold distaste in his expression: worse, infinitely worse and more shaming, than twenty years of bluster. ‘If we’d been bolder,’ she went on, ‘we might have escaped. I think perhaps we ought to have tried to. We ought to have stolen away, like thieves. But we decided to face the thing out. People were saying that the War wouldn’t last another year. We thought that, once it was over, everything would somehow be different… And while we were waiting, Noel was lost. That was the March of ’eighteen. It had been bad when John Arthur had died, but after Noel – I don’t know. My father made an invalid of himself. My mother went to pieces for a while. Our servants had left us; now we had a series of cooks and chars, one small calamity after another. It seemed easier to begin taking care of the house myself…

‘And then, in the August, my father died too; and it all came out about our money being gone. The new society I had planned with Christina began to look rather flimsy. The Armistice came, but what could I do? I couldn’t leave my mother, after everything she’d been through. She and I never discussed it, we never spoke a word about it; she knew what Chrissy was to me, but – no, I couldn’t leave her. I said to myself just what your family said to you: that millions of men had been lost, that millions of women had given up lovers, brothers, sons, ambitions… It was one more sacrifice, that’s all. I thought of it as a sort of bravery.’

Lilian was gazing at her, appalled. ‘But what about your friend?’

‘Oh —’ Frances looked away. ‘Well, it was hard when we parted. It was – It was worse than hard. But Christina did all right in the end. She got out of the suburbs, just as she meant to. You’d never know, meeting her now, that she’d grown up in a street called Hilldrop Villas.’

‘Did she marry?’

‘Marry? No! At any rate, not in the way you mean. She found another friend. Or, the friend found her. Someone braver than me – or harder-hearted, anyhow. She broke with her family years ago, and does just fine without them. A schoolmistress, as it happens. Well, she calls herself an artist. She has a studio in Pimlico and makes lumpy cups and saucers.’ She caught Lilian’s eye. ‘Do I sound sour about it? I suppose I am a little sour. It isn’t always easy, visiting Christina, looking at the life she has and thinking that it was meant to be mine. I would be with her today if I weren’t feeling so rotten. What’s the time?’ She looked for the clock. ‘Yes, I’d be there right now.’ She turned her face to the open window and called lightly: ‘Sorry, Chrissy!’ Turning back, she spoke with a yawn. ‘At least I won’t have put her to any trouble. She’s the untidiest person I know.’

Lilian’s face had remained colourless, all this time. Now, surprisingly, she blushed. In a flat voice, she said, ‘You still care about her.’

‘What? No, no. Not like that. That’s all finished with, years ago.’

‘But you said you were in love.’

‘I was,’ said Frances. ‘We were. But Christina has her Stevie now, and I had the love wrung out of me. Or – what is it they do with vampires? Shove cricket stumps through their hearts? Yes, I was well and truly stumped.’ She sighed, and rubbed her eyes. She felt exhausted, emptied out. ‘And none of it should matter, Lilian. With the world in the state it is, it’s such a small, small thing. But I think the sad fact is that I’m about as happy in my life as you are in yours. I do my best for my mother – or, I tell myself that I do. Sometimes I seem to do nothing but scold her; we cross each other like a pair of scissors. She isn’t happy, either. How could she be? I think she’s simply marking time. Well, perhaps we all are.’

For a while, then, they were silent, Frances sighing again, Lilian still blushing, sitting with her head lowered, frowning into her lap. She was rubbing at a wrinkle in the fabric of her skirt, going over and over the crease with her thumb in a fretful, preoccupied way.

And soon the silence had gone on so long that Frances began to be afraid that, after all, she had spoken too frankly. She said, ‘You won’t mention Christina’s name in front of my mother, will you? She doesn’t know that Chrissy and I still see each other. She’d have an absolute fit if she did. And – And you won’t tell Leonard? You haven’t told him already?’

That made Lilian look back at her. ‘Of course I haven’t told Leonard.’

‘Well, I don’t know how these things work. I always supposed that husbands and wives told each other everything.’

Lilian didn’t answer that. She still looked preoccupied, burdened. And after another minute of silence she passed a hand across her face and said, in the same flat way as before, ‘I ought to go, Frances. I’ve things to do, before Len gets back.’

Frances nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’ But she looked on in dismay as Lilian got down from the bed. Watching her straightening the seams of her skirt, she said, ‘Thank you for coming in. I’m so very sorry to know about your baby. But I’m glad you told me. Thanks for talking so honestly. And thank you for listening to all that – all that vampire business.’

Again Lilian said nothing, simply stood looking back at her through the gloom. Then, with an awkward bob of her head, she turned away, towards the door.

But then she paused, as if thinking something over. And, unexpectedly, she turned back. Blushing harder than ever, she came to the head of the bed, stopping just a foot or so away from where Frances was sitting; and she put out a hand towards Frances’s bosom. She didn’t touch the bosom itself. Instead, while Frances watched, transfixed, bewildered, she curled her fingers as if taking hold of something that lay jutting out of Frances’s breast, and, making a creaking, hissing sound with her mouth, she slowly pulled her hand back.