The Paying Guests Read online

  The cake toasted quickly. With careful fingers they turned their slices, then loaded on the butter, holding plates beneath their chins as they ate, to catch the greasy drips. ‘Only think of the poor Russians!’ said Christina, gathering crumbs. But that reminded her of the little paper she was working for, and she began to tell Frances all about it. It had its office, she said, in a Clerkenwell basement, in a terrace that looked as though it ought to be condemned. She had spent two days there this week, and had passed the whole time in fear of her life. ‘You can hear the house creaking and groaning, like the one in Little Dorrit!’ The pay was wretched, of course, but the work was interesting. The paper had its own printing press; she was to learn how to set type. Everyone did a bit of everything – that was how the place was run. And she was already ‘Christina’ to the two young editors, and they were ‘David’ and ‘Philip’ to her…

  What fun it sounded, Frances thought. She herself had only one piece of news to share, and that was the arrival of Mr and Mrs Barber. For days she had been imagining how she’d describe the couple to Chrissy; the two of them had had long, sparkling conversations about them, in her head. But what with the new haircut, and the Russian Famine, and David and Philip – She finished her cake, saying nothing. In the end it was Christina herself who, yawning, extending her legs, pointing her neat slipperless feet like a ballerina, said, ‘You’ve let me run on like anything! What are the excitements in Camberwell? There must be something, surely?’ She patted her mouth, then stopped her hand. ‘Wait a bit. Weren’t your lodgers due, when I saw you last?’

  Frances said, ‘We call them paying guests, on Champion Hill.’

  ‘They’ve arrived? Why didn’t you say? How deep you are! Well? How do you like them?’

  ‘Oh —’ Frances’s smart comments had shrunk away. All she could picture was nice Mrs Barber, the tambourine in her hand. She said at last, ‘They’re all right. It’s odd having people in the house again, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you put a tumbler to the wall?’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘I would. I’m glued to the floor every time the girl downstairs sneaks in her gentleman friend. It’s as good as a Marie Stopes lecture. If I had your Mr and Mrs – What are their names?’

  ‘Barber. Leonard and Lilian. Len and Lil, they call each other.’

  ‘Len and Lil, from Peckham Rye!’

  ‘They have to be from somewhere, you know.’

  ‘If I had them in the next room I wouldn’t get an ounce of work done.’

  ‘The novelty soon wears off, I assure you.’

  ‘Well, you don’t paint much of a picture… How’s the husband?’

  Frances recalled his unsettling blue gaze. ‘I’m not sure. I haven’t quite got his measure. Pleased with himself. A cock among hens.’

  ‘And the wife?’

  ‘Oh, much better than him. Good-looking, in the fleshy sort of way that men admire. A bit romantic. Really, I can’t say. We pass each other on the stairs. We meet on the landing. Everything happens on the landing. I had no idea that landings could be so thrilling. Ours has become the equivalent of Clapham Railway Junction. One of us is always going across it, or backing out of it – or lurking in a siding until the line is clear.’

  ‘And how’s your mother taken to it all?’

  ‘Yes, Mother’s keeping her end up.’

  ‘She doesn’t mind sleeping on the dining-table, or whatever it is she’s doing? Rum to picture her as a landlady, I must say! Has she steamed open any post yet?’

  Frances made no answer to that. But Christina didn’t seem to expect one. She was yawning again, and stretching, making those Lopokova points with her toes. They oughtn’t to leave the fire burning, she said, without toasting more cake. Had they room for a second helping? They decided that they had, and speared another two slices.

  And they had eaten the cake, and drunk their tea, when they heard the sound of a barrel organ starting up, out on the street. They tilted their heads to listen. The melody was a jumble of notes to begin with; then their ears got the thread of it. It was ‘Roses of Picardy’, the most banal tune imaginable, but one of the songs of their youth. They looked at each other. Frances, embarrassed, said, ‘This old thing.’

  But Christina scrambled to her feet. ‘Oh, let’s go and see.’

  The organist was on the pavement directly below them. He was an ex-service man in a trench-coat and Tommy’s cap, with a couple of campaign medals just visible at his breast. He had the organ on a set of pram wheels; it appeared to be held together with string. Its sound was so raw and almost discordant that the music seemed not so much to be rising from the box as tumbling out of it, as if the notes were physical things of glass or metal, landing clanging at the man’s feet.

  After a minute he looked up, saw the two of them watching, and lifted his cap to them. Frances went to her bag for money. She dithered, for a moment, when she found nothing smaller than a sixpence, but she returned to the open window and carefully threw the coin down. The man caught it in his cap, very neatly, tucked it away, and waved the cap again, keeping the organ going as he did it, without the slightest interruption.

  The sun had warmed the window-sill with real, summerish heat. Christina settled herself more comfortably, shutting her eyes, turning up her face. There were crumbs of cake at the corner of her mouth still, and butter on her lips: Frances smiled to see the shine of it, then let her own eyes close, giving herself over to the sunlight, to the niceness of the moment, and to the tune, that was so piercingly reminiscent of a particular phase of wartime.

  The note of the music wobbled. The man was moving on, still paying out the melody. As he turned to leave the pavement a board was revealed on the back of his trench-coat, on which he had painted the words:

  WILLING TO

  GRIND!

  WILL YOU

  EMPLOY ME?

  Frances and Christina watched him cross the road. ‘What’s to be done for them?’ asked Chrissy.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s to be a meeting at the Conway Hall next week, “Charity versus Challenge”. Sidney Webb is to speak – for what that’s worth. You ought to come.’

  Frances nodded. ‘I might.’

  ‘Only, you won’t.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe it’ll help, that’s all.’

  ‘You’d rather stay at home, scrub a lavatory pan or two.’

  ‘Well, lavatory pans must be scrubbed. Even the Webbs’, I expect.’

  She didn’t want to talk about it. What was the good? In any case, she couldn’t quite tug her mind free from the music. The tune came more faintly as the man turned a corner, the last few strands of it like the fine but clinging threads at the edge of a piece of unhemmed linen. Roses are shining in Picardy, in the hush of the silver dew. Roses are flow’ring in Picardy, but —

  ‘There’s Stevie,’ said Christina.

  ‘Stevie? Where?’

  ‘Down there. Just coming.’

  Frances leaned, peered over the sill, and spotted the tall, rather handsome figure making for the entrance of the building. ‘Oh,’ she said, without excitement. ‘No school for her today?’

  ‘The school’s shut for three days. Some naughty boys broke in and flooded it. She’s been at her studio instead. She has a new one, in Pimlico.’

  They remained at the window for another few moments, then returned, in silence, to their places on the floor. The electric fire was grey now, ticking again as it cooled. Soon there were footsteps out on the landing, followed by the rattle of a latch-key being put into the lock of the door.

  The door opened almost directly on to the room. ‘Hullo Stinker,’ said Christina, as Stevie appeared.

  ‘Hullo you,’ Stevie answered. And then: ‘Frances! Good to see you. Your day up in Town, is it?’

  She was hatless and coatless and smoking a cigarette. Her short dark hair was brushed back from her forehead, completely against the fashion; her outfit was plain as a canvas
overall, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, showing off her knobbly hands and wrists. But Frances was struck, as she always was, by the dash of her, the queer panache, the air she had of not caring if the world admired her or thought her an oddity. She had a hefty satchel over her shoulder, which she let fall with a thud as she approached the armchairs. She looked at the fire and the toasting-forks, smiling but wary.

  ‘What’s the idea? A nursery tea?’

  ‘Isn’t it shaming?’ said Christina. Her manner had changed with Stevie’s arrival, had become arch and brittle in a way Frances knew and disliked. ‘When poor Frances comes to see us she has to bring her own tuck. Aren’t we lucky she’s so clever! Swap you a slice for a couple of cigarettes?’

  Stevie fished in a pocket for her case and lighter. ‘Done.’

  She helped herself to a piece of the loaf, then sat down in the velveteen armchair, her knee just touching Christina’s shoulder. Her fingernails were dark with clay, Frances could see now, and there was a dirty thumb-print like a bruise at her left temple. Christina noticed the thumb-print too, and reached up to rub it away.

  ‘You look like a chimney-sweep, Stevie.’

  ‘And you,’ said Stevie, surveying with satisfaction Christina’s unpressed clothes, ‘look like a chimney-sweep’s trollop.’ She took a large bite of cake. ‘Aside from your hair, that is. What do you think of it, Frances?’

  Frances was lighting a cigarette. Christina answered for her. ‘She hates it, of course.’

  Frances said, ‘I don’t hate it at all. It’d cause a stir on Champion Hill, though.’

  Christina snorted. ‘Well, that’s a point in its favour, in my book. Stevie and I were in Hammersmith last week. The stares I got were out of this world! No one said a word, of course.’

  ‘No one would, to your face,’ said Stevie, ‘in a place like that.’ She polished off her slice of cake and licked her dirty thumb and fingers. ‘I lived on the Brompton Road once, you know, Frances. The gentility – my God! My neighbour was a man who worked for one of the big shipping firms. His wife kept a Bible in the window. Church three times on a Sunday, all that. But at night, I’d hear them through the walls, practically hurling the fire irons at each other! That’s the clerk class for you. They look tame. They sound tame. But under those doilies and antimacassars they’re still rough as all hell. No, give me good honest slum people over people like that, any day. At least they have their brawls in the open.’

  Christina put out a foot and nudged Frances with her toes. ‘You taking note?’ To Stevie she explained, ‘Frances has her own little clerk now, and her own little clerk’s wife…’

  Stevie listened to the story of the coming of the Barbers with the sort of wincing expression with which she might have heard out the symptoms of some embarrassing disease. As soon as she could, Frances turned the conversation. How were things, she asked, in the giddy world of ceramics? Stevie answered at length, telling her about a couple of new designs she was trying out. They were nothing avant-garde, unfortunately. No one wanted experiment any more; the art-buying public had become frightfully conservative since the War. But she was doing what she could to push the figurative into the abstract… She leaned over the side of the armchair to fetch a book from her satchel, found pictures and passages to illustrate what she meant, even made a couple of quick sketches for Frances’s benefit.

  Frances nodded and murmured, glancing now and then at Christina; she was looking on, saying little, fiddling with the lace of one of Stevie’s polished flat brown shoes. With her head tilted forward, the line of her fringe seemed blunter than ever, and the curls in front of her ears looked so flat and so pointed they might have been the blades of can-openers. In the old days, her hair had been long; she had worn it puffed around her head in a way that had always made Frances think, fondly, of a marigold. She’d had that marigold hairstyle the very first time Frances had caught sight of her, on a drizzly day in Hyde Park. She had been nineteen, Frances twenty. God, how distant that seemed! Or, no, not distant, but a different life, a different age, as unlike this one as pepper was salt. There had been a pearl brooch on her lapel, and one of her gloves had had a rip in it, showing the pink palm underneath. My heart fell out of me and into that rip, Frances had used to tell her, later.

  Stevie ran out of steam at last. Frances seized the opportunity to rise and gather together the tea-things, visit the landing, wash her hands. ‘Thanks for the smoke,’ she said, as she pinned on her hat.

  Stevie offered her case. ‘Why not take one or two with you? They must make a change from those gaspers of yours.’

  ‘Oh, I’m happy with the gaspers.’

  ‘You are?’

  Christina said, in her Bloomsbury voice, ‘Let her be a martyr, Stevie. She likes it.’

  They parted without a farewell kiss. Down in the lobby, Frances caught sight of the porter’s clock and saw with dismay that it was well past five. She had stayed longer than she’d meant to. She would have enjoyed the walk back to Vauxhall, or at least to Westminster, but there was dinner to be started at home. Rather regretting, now, having given that sixpence to the organ-grinder, and feeling guilty about her cosy-corner lunch, she decided to save a penny by taking a tram instead of a bus. She walked to Holborn for the tram she needed, had to wait an age before it came; then was rattled queasily across the river into the low, close streets of the south.

  Almost the moment she left the tram she was approached by another ex-soldier, this one more ragged than the last. He limped along beside her, holding out a canvas bag, telling her the details of his military record: he’d served with the Worcesters in France and Palestine, been wounded in this and that campaign… When she shook her head at him he stopped, let her go on a couple of paces, and then called hoarsely after her:

  ‘I hope you’re never broke!’

  She turned around, embarrassed, and tried to speak lightly. ‘What makes you think I’m not broke already?’

  He looked disgusted, raising his hand and then bringing it down, turning away. ‘You’ve done all right, you bloody women,’ she heard him say.

  She had seen the same opinion, scarcely less bald, in the daily papers. But she arrived home more disgruntled than ever. She found her mother in the kitchen and told her all about it.

  Her mother said, ‘Poor fellow. He oughtn’t to have spoken so roughly to you; that was certainly wrong. But one does have sympathy for all these fighting men whose jobs have been lost.’

  ‘I have sympathy for them, too!’ cried Frances. ‘I was against their going to war in the first place! But to blame women – it’s absurd. What have we gained, aside from a vote that half of us can’t even use?’

  Her mother looked patient. She had heard all this before. ‘Well, no one is hurt. No one is injured.’ She was watching Frances unpack her shopping. ‘I don’t suppose you found a match for my sewing silks?’

  ‘Yes, I did. Here they are.’

  Her mother took the reels and held them to the light. ‘Oh, clever girl, these are – Oh, but you didn’t buy Sylko?’

  ‘These are just as good, Mother.’

  ‘I do find Sylko the best.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately it’s also the most expensive.’

  ‘But, surely, now that Mr and Mrs Barber have come —’

  ‘We still need to be careful,’ said Frances. ‘We still need to be very careful.’ She checked that the door was closed; they had already lowered their voices. ‘Don’t you remember, when I showed you the accounts?’

  ‘Yes, but, well, it did cross my mind – I did just wonder, Frances, whether we mightn’t be able to afford a servant again.’

  ‘A servant?’ Frances couldn’t keep the impatience out of her tone. ‘Well, yes, we might. But you know how much a decent cook-general costs nowadays. It would be half the Barbers’ rent gone, just like that. And meanwhile our boots are falling in pieces, we dread ever having to send for the doctor, our winter coats look like things from the Dark Ages. And then, another stranger in
the house, someone to have to get to know —’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said her mother, hastily. ‘I dare say you know best.’

  ‘When I can take care of things perfectly well —’

  ‘Yes, yes, Frances. I do see how impossible it is. Truly I do. Don’t let’s talk about it any more. Tell me about your day in Town. You made sure to have luncheon, I hope?’

  Frances, with an effort, made herself sound less shrewish. ‘Yes, I did. At a café.’

  ‘And after that? Where did you go? How did you spend your afternoon?’

  ‘Oh —’ Turning away, she answered at random. ‘I walked about a bit, that’s all. I finished up at the British Museum. I had my tea there.’

  ‘The British Museum? I haven’t been there in years. What did you look at?’

  ‘Oh, the usual galleries. Marbles, mummies, that sort of thing. – Look, how hungry are you?’ She had opened the meat-safe door. ‘We’ve skirt, again. I might run it through the mincer.’ I shall enjoy doing that, she thought.

  She did not enjoy it as much as she had hoped to. The beef was poor and kept clogging. She’d meant the meal to be an easy one, but, perhaps because she was discontented, the food seemed to turn against her, the potatoes boiling dry in their pan, the gravy refusing to thicken. Her mother, as sometimes happened, disappeared at the critical moment: she still liked to change her gown and re-pin her hair for dinner, and she tended to misjudge the minutes as she was doing it. By the time she had re-emerged, the food was cooling in its dishes. Frances almost ran with the plates to the drawing-room table. Another delay, then, while her mother said Grace…

  She swallowed the food without enjoying it. They discussed the various appointments of the days ahead. Tomorrow they were off to the cemetery: it was her father’s birthday; they were taking flowers to his grave. On Monday they must remember to change their library books. On Wednesday —