The Paying Guests Page 4

  Now, why would he say that? He might have guessed that her brothers – But, of course, he knew nothing about her brothers, she reminded herself, even though he and his wife were sleeping in their old room. She said, in an attempt to match his tone, ‘Oh, I hear those fellows are over-rated. You work in assurance, I think you told us?’

  ‘That’s right. For my sins!’

  ‘What is it you do, exactly?’

  ‘Me? I’m an assessor of lives. Our agents send in applications for policies. I pass them on to our medical man and, depending on his report, I say whether the life to be assured counts as good, bad or indifferent.’

  ‘Good, bad or indifferent,’ she repeated, struck by the idea. ‘You sound like St Peter.’

  ‘St Peter!’ He laughed. ‘I like that! That’s clever, Miss Wray. Yes, I shall try that out on the fellows at the Pearl.’

  Once his laughter had faded she assumed that he would move on. But the little exchange had only made him chummier: he sidled into the scullery doorway and settled himself against the post of it. He seemed to enjoy watching her work. His blue gaze travelled over her and she felt him taking her all in: her apron, her steam-frizzed hair, her rolled-up sleeves, her scarlet knuckles.

  She began to chop some mint for a sauce. He asked if the mint had come from the garden. Yes, she said, and he jerked his head towards the window. ‘I was just having a look at it out there. Quite a size, isn’t it? You and your mother don’t take care of it all by yourselves, do you?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we call in a man for the heavier jobs when —’ When we can run to it, she thought. ‘When they need doing. The vicar’s son comes and mows the lawn for us. We manage the rest between us all right.’

  That wasn’t quite true. Her mother did her genteel best with the weeding and the pruning. As far as Frances was concerned, gardening was simply open-air housework; she had enough of that already. As a consequence, the garden – a fine one, in her father’s day – was growing more shapeless by the season, more depressed and unkempt. Mr Barber said, ‘Well, I’d be glad to give you a hand with it – you just say the word. I generally help with my father’s at home. His isn’t half the size of yours, mind. Not a quarter, even. Still, the guvnor’s made the most of it. He even has cucumbers in a frame. Beauties, they are – this long!’ He held his hands apart, to show her. ‘Ever thought of cucumbers, Miss Wray?’

  ‘Well —’

  ‘Growing them, I mean?’

  Was there some sort of innuendo there? She could hardly believe that there was. But his gaze was lively, as it had been the night before, and, just as something about his manner then had discomposed her, so, now, she had the feeling that he was poking fun at her, perhaps attempting to make her blush.

  Without replying, she turned to fetch vinegar and sugar for the mint, and when the sauce was mixed and in its bowl she removed her hot-pot from the oven, put in a knife to test the meat; she stood so long with her back to him that he took the hint at last and pushed away from the door-post. It seemed to her that, as he left the kitchen, he was smiling. And once he’d started along the passage she heard him begin to whistle, at a rather piercing pitch. The tune was a jaunty, music-hall one – it took her a moment to recognise it – it was ‘Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy’. The whistle faded as he climbed the stairs, but a few minutes later she found that she was whistling the tune herself. She quickly cut the whistle off, but it was as though he’d left a stubborn odour behind him: do what she could, the wretched song kept floating back into her head all evening long.

  2

  There was more jaunty whistling, in the days that followed. There were more yodelling yawns at the top of the stairs. There were sneezes, too – those loud masculine sneezes, like shouts into the hand, that Frances could remember from the days of her brothers; sneezes that for some reason never came singly, but arrived as a volley and led inevitably to a last-trump blowing of the nose. Then there was the lavatory seat forever left in the upright position; there were the vivid yellow splashes and kinked wet gingerish hairs that appeared on the rim of the pan itself. Finally, on the dot of half-past ten each night, there was the clatter of a spoon in a glass as Mr Barber mixed himself an indigestion powder, followed a few seconds later by the little report of his belch.

  None of it was so very irksome. It was certainly not a lot to put up with for the sake of twenty-nine shillings a week. Frances supposed that she would grow used to it, that the Barbers would grow used to her, that the house would settle down into grooves and routines, that they’d all start rubbing along together – as Mr Barber himself, she reflected, might say. She found it hard to imagine herself ever rubbing along with him, it was true, and she had several despondent moments, lying in bed with her cigarette, wondering again what she had done, what she had let the house in for; trying to remember why she had ever thought that the arrangement would work.

  Still, at least Mrs Barber was easy to have about the place. That mid-morning bath, it seemed, had been a freak. She kept herself very much to herself as time went on, doing more of that ‘titivating’ her husband had pretended to grumble about, adding lengths of beading and swaths of macramé and lace to picture-rails and mantelpieces, arranging ostrich feathers in jars: Frances caught glimpses of it all as she went back and forth to her own room. Once, crossing the landing, she heard a sound like jingling bells, and glanced in through the open doorway of the couple’s sitting-room to see Mrs Barber with a tambourine in her hand. The tambourine had trailing ribbons and a gipsy look about it. Gipsyish, too, was Mrs Barber’s costume, the fringed skirt, the Turkish slippers; her hair was done up in a red silk scarf. Frances paused, not wanting to disturb her – then called lightly into the room.

  ‘Are you about to dance the tarantella, Mrs Barber?’

  Mrs Barber came to the doorway, smiling. ‘I’m still deciding what goes where.’

  Frances nodded to the tambourine. ‘May I see it?’ And then, when the thing was in her hand, ‘It’s pretty.’

  Mrs Barber wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s only from a junk shop. It’s really Italian, though.’

  ‘You have exotic tastes, I think.’

  ‘Len says I’m like a savage. That I ought to live in the jungle. I just like things that have come from other places.’

  And after all, thought Frances, what was wrong with that? She gave the tambourine a shake, tapped her fingers across its drum-skin. She might have lingered and said more; the moment, somehow, seemed to invite it. But it was Wednesday afternoon, and she and her mother were off to the cinema. With a touch of reluctance, she handed the tambourine back. ‘I hope you find the right spot for it.’

  When, a little later, she and her mother left the house, she said, ‘I suppose we might have asked Mrs Barber to come along with us today.’

  Her mother looked doubtful. ‘Mrs Barber? To the picture-house?’

  ‘You’d rather we didn’t?’

  ‘Well, perhaps once we know her better. But mightn’t it become awkward? Shouldn’t we have to ask her every time?’

  Frances thought about it. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  In any case, the programme that week was disappointing. The first few films were all right, but the drama was a dud, an American thriller with a plot full of holes. She and her mother slipped away before the final act, hoping not to draw the notice of the small orchestra – Mrs Wray saying, as she often did, what a pity it was that the pictures nowadays had so much unpleasantness in them.

  They met a neighbour, Mrs Hillyard, in the foyer. She was leaving early too, but from the dearer seats upstairs. They walked back up the road together, and, ‘How are your paying guests?’ she asked. She was too polite to call them lodgers. ‘Are they settling in? I see the husband in the mornings on his way to the City. He seems a very well-turned-out chap. I must say I rather envy you, having a young man in the house again. And you’ll enjoy having some young people about to argue with, Frances, I expect?’

  Frances smiled. ‘Oh, my arguing
days are all behind me.’

  ‘Of course they are. Your mother’s grateful for your company, I’m sure.’

  That night there was skirt of beef for dinner: Frances worked up a sweat beating it tender with a rolling-pin. The next day, with an hour to herself, she cleared soot from the kitchen flue. The muck got under her fingernails and into the creases of her palms, and had to be scrubbed off with lemon juice and salt.

  The day after that, feeling rather as though she’d earned a Friday treat, she left her mother a cold lunch and bread already buttered for tea, and went into Town.

  She liked to go in when she could, sometimes as a shopping expedition, sometimes to call on a friend. Depending on the weather, she had various ways of making the journey; the days had kept fine since the Barbers’ arrival so she was able, this time, to make the best of it on foot. She caught a bus as far as Vauxhall, and from there she crossed the river and wandered north, taking any street that caught her eye.

  She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn’t a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments – these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous. But it was the anonymity that did it. She never felt the electric charge when she walked through London with someone at her side. She never felt the excitement that she felt now, seeing the fall of the shadow of a railing across a set of worn steps. Was it foolish, to feel like that about the shadow of a railing? Was it whimsy? She hated whimsy. But it only became whimsy when she tried to put it into words. If she allowed herself simply to feel it… There. It was like being a string, and being plucked, giving out the single, pure note that one was made for. How odd, that no one else could hear it! If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they’d never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist’s, were the truest things in it.

  She crossed the street, swinging her bag, and a couple of gulls wheeled overhead, letting out those seaside cries that could be heard sometimes right in the middle of London, that always made her think that just around the next corner she would find the pier.

  She did her shopping at the market stalls of Strutton Ground, going from one stall to another before committing herself, wanting to be sure that she was ferreting out the bargains; she ended up with three reels of sewing thread, half a dozen pairs of flawed silk stockings and a box of nibs. The walk from Vauxhall had made her hungry, and with her purchases stowed away she began to think about her lunch. Often on these trips she ate at the National Gallery, the Tate – somewhere like that, where the refreshment rooms were so bustling that it was possible to order a pot of tea, then sneak out a home-made bun to have with it. That was a spinsterish thing to do, however; she wouldn’t be a spinster today. Good grief, she was only twenty-six! She found a ‘cosy corner’ café and bought herself a hot lunch: egg, chips and bread and butter, all for a shilling and sixpence, including a penny tip for the waitress. She resisted the temptation to mop the plate with the bread and butter, but felt quite vulgar enough to roll herself a cigarette. She smoked it to the satisfying chink and splash of crockery and water that floated up from the basement kitchen: the sound of someone else washing up.

  She walked to Buckingham Palace after that, not from any sentimental feeling about the King and Queen – whom, on the whole, she considered to be a pair of inbred leeches – but simply for the pleasure of being there, at the grand centre of things. For the same reason, after she had wandered about in St James’s Park she crossed the Mall and climbed the steps and went up to Piccadilly. She strolled a little way along Regent Street simply for the sake of its curve, pausing to goggle at the prices on the cards in the smart shop windows. Three-guinea shoes, four-guinea hats… A place on a corner was selling Persian antiques. A decorated jar was so tall and so round that a thief might hide in it. She thought, with a smile: Mrs Barber would like that.

  There were no smart shops once she had crossed Oxford Circus. London made one of its costume changes, like whipping off a cloak; it became a shabby muddle of pianola sellers, Italian grocers, boarding-houses, pubs. But she liked the names of the streets: Great Castle, Great Titchfield, Riding House, Ogle, Clipstone – her friend, Christina, lived on this last one, in two rooms on the top floor of an ugly, newish building. Frances went in by a brown-tiled passage, greeted the porter in his booth, passed on to the open courtyard and began the long climb up the stairs. As she approached Christina’s landing she could hear the sound of her typewriter, a fluid, hectic tap-tap-tap. She paused to catch her breath, put her finger to the push of the doorbell, and the typewriting ceased. A moment later Christina opened the door, tilting up her small, pale, pointed face for Frances’s kiss, but narrowing her eyes and blinking.

  ‘I can’t see you! I can only see letters, hopping about like fleas. Oh, I shall go blind, I know I shall. Just a minute, while I bathe my brow.’

  She slipped past Frances to wash her hands at the sink on the landing, and then to hold the hands to her forehead. She came back rubbing at an eye with a wet knuckle.

  The building was run by a society offering flats to working women. Christina’s neighbours were school-mistresses, stenographers, lady clerks; she herself made her living by typing up manuscripts and dissertations for authors and students, and by odd bits of secretarial and book-keeping work. Just now, she told Frances as she led her into the flat, she was helping out on a new little paper, a little political thing; she had been typing up statistics on the Russian Famine, and the constant fiddling about with the margins had given her a headache. Then, of course, there were the figures themselves, so many hundreds of thousands dead, so many hundreds of thousands still starving. It was miserable work.

  ‘And the worst of it is,’ she said guiltily, ‘it’s made me so hungry! And there isn’t a bit of food in the flat.’

  Frances opened her bag. ‘Hey presto – there is, now. I’ve made you a cake.’

  ‘Oh, Frances, you haven’t.’

  ‘Well, a currant loaf. I’ve been carrying it about with me, and it weighs a ton. Here you are.’

  She brought the loaf out, undid its string, parted its paper. Christina saw the glossy brown crust of it and her blue eyes widened like a child’s. There was only one thing to do with a cake like that, she said, and that was to toast it. She set a kettle on the gas-ring for tea, then rummaged about in a cupboard for an electric fire.

  ‘Sit down while this warms up,’ she said, as the fire began to tick and hum. ‘Oh, but let some air in, would you, so we don’t swelter.’

  Frances had to move a colander from the window-sill in order to raise the sash. The room was large and light, decorated in fashionable Bohemian colours, but there were untidy piles of books and papers on the floor, and nothing was where it ought to be. The armchairs were comedy-Victorian, one of scuffed red leather, the other of balding velveteen. The velveteen one had a tray balanced on it, bearing the remains of two breakfasts: sticky egg cups and dirty mugs. She passed the tray to Christina, who cleared it, gave it a wipe, set it with cups, saucers, plates and a smeary bottle of milk, and handed it back. The mugs, the egg cups, the cups and saucers, were all of pottery, heavily glazed, thickly made – all of it with a rather ‘primitive’ finish. Christina shared this flat with another woman, Stevie. Stevie was a teacher in the art department of a girls’ school in Camden Town, but was trying to make a name for herself as a maker of ceramics.

  Frances did not dislike Stevie exactly, but she generally timed her visits so that they fell inside school hours; it was Chrissy she came to see. The two of them had known each other since the mid-point of the War. With the coming of Peace, perversely, they had parted on bad terms, but fate had br
ought them back together – fate, or chance, or whatever it was that, one day last September, had sent Frances into the National Gallery to escape a torrent of rain, had nudged her out of the Flemish rooms and into the Italian, where she had come upon Christina, as sodden as herself, gazing with a mixed expression at Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. There had been no chance of a retreat. While Frances had stood there, disconcerted, Christina had turned, and their eyes had met; after the first awkwardness, the more-than-coincidence of it had been impossible to resist, and now they saw each other two or three times a month. Their friendship sometimes struck Frances as being like a piece of soap – like a piece of ancient kitchen soap that had got worn to the shape of her hand, but which had been dropped to the floor so many times it was never quite free of its bits of cinder.

  Today, for example, she saw that Christina had re-styled her hair. The hair had been short at their last meeting, a fortnight before; now it was even more severely shingled at the back, with a straight fringe halfway up Christina’s forehead and two flat, pointed curls in front of her ears. Rather wilfully eccentric, Frances thought the style. She thought the same of Christina’s frock, which was a swirl of muddy pinks and greys, and matched the Bloomsbury walls. She thought it of the walls, for that matter; of the whole untidy flat. She never came here without looking at the disorder of it all in a mixture of envy and despair, imagining the cool, calm, ordered place the rooms would be if they were hers.

  She didn’t mention the haircut. She closed her eyes to the mess. The kettle came to the boil and Christina filled the teapot, cut the cake into slices, produced butter, knives and two brass toasting-forks. ‘Let’s sit on the floor and do it properly,’ she said, so they pushed back the armchairs and made themselves comfortable on the rug. Frances’s fork had Mother Shipton for its handle. Christina’s had a cat that was playing a fiddle. The bars of the fire had turned from grey to pink to glowing orange, and smelt powerfully of scorching dust.