The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

  As she spoke, she hung the parasol on a peg of the coat-stand, then pulled off her lace gloves, finger by finger.

  But when she had drawn both gloves free, she paused with them in her hand; and she and Frances looked at each other.

  Frances said, ‘I enjoyed our picnic.’

  ‘So did I, Miss Wray.’

  ‘We might do it again, another day.’

  ‘I’d like that, yes.’

  ‘In which case – well, I wonder if you’d consider calling me Frances.’

  She looked pleased. ‘I’d like that, too.’

  ‘What shall I call you, though? I’ll stick to Mrs Barber, if you prefer.’

  ‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t! I hate the name; I always have. It’s like a card from Happy Families, isn’t it? You might call me Lil, I suppose, which is what my sisters call me, but – No, don’t call me that. Len says it makes me sound like a barmaid. He calls me Lily.’

  ‘Lily, Lil. Mayn’t I simply call you Lilian?’

  ‘Lilian?’ She blinked, surprised. ‘Hardly anybody calls me that.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to call you a name that hardly anyone else calls you.’

  ‘Would you? Why?’

  ‘I don’t quite know,’ said Frances. ‘But it’s a handsome name. It suits you.’

  The comment was a piece of gallantry, really. How, in the circumstances, could it have been anything else? But they stood a yard apart, in the relative gloom of the landing, and in the silence that followed her words there came another of those shifts, those alchemic little quickenings… Once again, Mrs Barber looked uncertain for a second. Then, smiling, she dipped her head. It was just as if, Frances thought, she was unable to do anything with a compliment except receive it, absorb it; even when it came from a woman.

  ‘How funny you are, Miss Wray,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes, do call me Lilian.’

  And, in another moment, they parted.

  Over dinner that night, when Frances’s mother asked her how she had enjoyed her afternoon, she said, Yes, it had been pleasant. She and Mrs Barber had liked looking at the flowers. They had been glad to stretch their legs… She meant to leave the matter there.

  Five minutes later, however, she found herself adding, ‘You know, I’ve begun to feel rather sorry for Mrs Barber. She spoke a bit about her marriage today, and I don’t think it can be a very happy one.’

  Her mother looked up from her plate. ‘She didn’t tell you that herself?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘I should hope not, no, on so slight an acquaintance.’

  ‘But, still, that’s the impression I got.’

  ‘Well, she and Mr Barber can’t be so very unhappy. Whenever I overhear them they seem to do nothing but laugh. Probably they’ve had some sort of a quarrel. I dare say they’ll soon be on terms again.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps,’ said Frances. ‘But, I don’t know. It seemed a larger thing than a quarrel, to me.’

  Her mother’s tone grew comfortable. ‘Oh, these things often seem larger, from the outside. Even your father and I had our occasional fallings-out… But we really oughtn’t to be discussing it, Frances. If Mrs Barber tries to talk to you about the matter again, do your best to discourage her, will you?’ She returned to her dinner, nudging spinach on to her fork – then paused with the fork lifted. ‘I hope you haven’t been speaking frankly to her.’

  Frances was sawing at a piece of mutton. ‘Well, of course I haven’t.’

  ‘With relations like hers —’

  ‘I think she’s simply a little lonely. And she’s a kind woman. I like her. We have to live with her, after all.’ Still cutting, she spoke blandly. ‘There’s no reason why she and I shouldn’t be friends, is there?’

  Her mother hesitated, but said nothing. The bit of mutton gave at last. Frances chewed and chewed, then swallowed, then turned the conversation; and they finished the meal without mentioning the Barbers again.

  And perhaps, in any case, her mother had been right. While she was out in the kitchen later, polishing the knives and forks, the Barbers’ gramophone started up: she could hear it across the house, a lively modern dance tune. Whatever differences the couple had had, they must already have settled them. The music went on for half an hour, one melody giving way to another, the final record winding down in a sort of melting groan as no one ran to turn the handle; after that there was a silence, somehow more bothersome than the jazz. Frances went to bed without seeing Mrs Barber again, and when they met the following day they were both slightly shy. They made a point of calling each other by their Christian names, but the moment was awkward, contrived. Their friendship seemed to have foundered before it had barely set sail. Mrs Barber left the house in the afternoon with a shopping bag over her arm, and Frances, suddenly restless, drifted about from room to room. She hadn’t planned to go into Town, but in a fit of decision she changed her clothes, went out, caught a bus to Oxford Circus and called on Christina. Christina asked how she and her mother were getting on with Len and Lil, and she answered with jokes about the crowded house, queues for the bath-tub.

  But then, next morning, while Mr Barber was at work and her mother was clipping lavender bushes in the back garden, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom to fetch a bag of laundry; coming out of the room with the bag in her arms, she glanced across the stairwell – and there was Mrs Barber, seated at the table in her kitchen, shelling peas into a bowl, reading a library book as she did it. She was wearing her plum-coloured gown, and her hair was up in its red silk scarf, the ends of the scarf lying ticklingly against the nape of her neck; she was easing the peas from the pod without once looking at them. And since Frances could never see anyone absorbed in a book without itching to know its title, she called across the stairwell.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading, Lilian?’

  The name sounded natural at last. Lilian turned, blinked, smiled. She opened her mouth to answer, then changed her mind and lifted the book to show its spine. Frances, of course, was too far off to read it. She went around the landing and looked in from the kitchen doorway; and then she saw the library lettering. The book was Anna Karenina.

  Exclaiming with pleasure, she moved forward. Lilian watched her come. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘It’s one of my favourites. Where are you up to?’

  ‘Oh, it’s awful. There’s just been a race, and —’

  ‘The poor horse.’

  ‘The poor horse!’

  ‘What’s its name? Something unlikely. Mimi?’

  ‘Frou-Frou.’

  ‘Frou-Frou! That’s right. Do you suppose that sounds dashing in Russian?’

  ‘Oh, I could hardly bear to read it. And poor Vronsky – Is that how you say it?’

  ‘I believe so. Yes, poor Vronsky. Poor Anna. Poor everyone! Even poor old dull Karenin. Oh, I haven’t read it in years. You make me want to again. May I see it?’

  She took the book from Lilian’s hand, careful not to lose her place, and looked from one page to another. ‘Princess Betsy. I’d forgotten her. Dolly, Kitty… Where’s the bit where Anna appears at the station? Isn’t it right at the start?’

  ‘No, there are chapters and chapters first.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Let me show you.’

  Their fingers collided in the pages as Lilian retrieved the novel. She searched for a minute, then handed the book back – and there was the moment that Frances had remembered, nearly a hundred pages in after all, Vronsky moving aside from the door of the train to allow Anna to step down on to the Moscow platform.

  She drew out a chair, and sat. She read the scene right through while Lilian shelled the peas; soon, their fingers colliding again as they reached into the bowl, they were shelling the peas together, discussing novels, poems, plays, the authors they did and didn’t admire… The day was warm, and the window was open; from out in the garden, as they chatted, there came the snip of secateurs. And only when the secateurs fell silent and Frances’s mother
could be heard in the yard, making her way back to the house, did Frances get to her feet, and retrieve her laundry, and head downstairs.

  After that they met more or less daily, partly to compare their thoughts on Anna Karenina – which Frances had begun to re-read – but mainly, simply, for the pleasure of each other’s company. Whenever they could, they shared their housework, or made their chores overlap. One Monday morning they washed blankets together in a zinc tub on the lawn, Frances feeding them through the mangle while Lilian turned the wheel; afterwards, hot, damp, their skirts hauled up over their knees, they sat on the step drinking tea and smoking cigarettes like chars. Two or three times they returned to the park, always making the same small circuit, always finishing up at the band-stand, looking for the names of new lovers in the paint. And one bright afternoon while Frances’s mother was visiting a neighbour they carried cushions out to the garden and lay in the shade of the linden tree eating Turkish delight. Frances had seen the sweets on a market stall and had bought them for Lilian as a gift. ‘To match your Turkish slippers,’ she said, as she handed them over. They were the sham English variety, sickly pink and white cubes; she herself gave up on them after a single bite. But Lilian, delighted, prised out lump after lump, putting each piece whole into her mouth, closing her eyes in ecstasy.

  Just occasionally, Frances found herself wondering what the two of them had in common. Now and then, when they were apart, she’d struggle to remember where the essence of their friendship lay. But then they would meet, exchange a smile… and she wouldn’t wonder at all. Lilian might not be amusing or clever in the way that Christina, say, was amusing and clever – But, no, she was amusing, and she was clever; she could sew, for example, like a Bond Street seamstress, thought nothing of picking apart an entire garment and restyling it, nothing of settling down at three o’clock in the afternoon with a needle and a thousand seed-pearls that had to be attached to a blouse in time for a trip to a dancing-hall that night. Frances would sit and watch her do it, and marvel at her poise – admiring again her calmness, her stillness, that capacity she had for filling her own smooth skin. It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.

  The bigger mystery, surely, was that marriage of hers. Every so often when her husband stopped in the kitchen for one of his chats Frances would study him, trying to discover some quality in him that might chime with some quality of Lilian’s; more often than not, she failed to do it. She asked again about their courtship, and Lilian replied as she had before: he’d had nice blue eyes, a sense of fun… Beyond that, she became evasive; so Frances learned to leave the subject. She had evasions of her own, after all. How little the two of them knew each other, really. They were practically strangers. She hadn’t had an inkling of Lilian’s existence until six weeks before. Now she’d catch herself thinking of her at all sorts of odd moments, always slightly surprised when she did so, able to follow the thought backward, stage by stage, link by link, this idea having been called to mind by that one, which in turn had been suggested by that… But they all had their finish at Lilian, wherever they started.

  But women’s friendships were like that, she reflected: a giddy-up, and off they cantered. If she occasionally lapsed into gallantry – well, there was something about Lilian that inspired gallantry, that was all. And if there were more of those moments, those little licks, almost of romance, they meant nothing; she was sure they meant nothing. Lilian, at least, seemed untroubled by them. She might look doubtful for a second, but she always laughed the doubt away. She might gaze at Frances from time to time with her eyes narrowed and her head cocked, as if she could sense some enigma to her and wanted to get to the bottom of it. Or she would turn the conversation to love and marriage, in a hinting way… And then, it was true, Frances would feel a qualm, a prick of unease, to think of the shallow foundations on which their intimacy was built. And she would resolve in future to be more cautious; but the caution unravelled, every time.

  By now it was June, true summer, each day finer than the last. Mr Barber grew jauntier than ever, going off to work on Saturday mornings with his tennis racket under his arm, spending the afternoons at his sports club, coming home to boast to Frances about the points he had won, the spots he’d knocked off the opposition. And in the long, light evenings he took to wandering about the house looking for little jobs to do, things to fix and improve. He oiled hinges, re-cemented loose tiles on the hall floor, replaced the washer in the scullery tap so that it lost its plink. Frances couldn’t decide if she was grateful for the help or felt piqued by it. She had been planning for ages to see to those tiles herself. Now, whenever he crossed the hall, she had to listen to him pause, test the floor with his foot, and give a murmur of satisfaction as he admired his own handiwork.

  But perhaps his energy was infectious. One morning in the middle of the month she went looking for a fly-swatter, and when she opened a cupboard in the passage a pile of things tumbled out. The things were her brothers’; the house was full of them; she had got used to digging her way through layers of school caps and cricket balls and Henty novels and fossil collections whenever she searched for something in a drawer or a chest. But would she have to dig for ever? Her brothers were never coming back. She collected everything she could find, then summoned her mother. For an hour they sifted and sorted, her mother resisting at every step. The books could go to a charity, surely? Oh, but Noel had had this one as a prize; his name was inside it; it wasn’t quite nice to think of another little boy looking at that. Well, all right. But, these boots? Couldn’t they go? Yes, the boots could go. And the boxing-gloves, the telescope, the microscope and slides?

  ‘Must we do it now, Frances?’

  ‘We’ll have to do it some time.’

  ‘Mightn’t we put them in a trunk, in a cellar?’

  ‘The cellar’s full of Father’s things. Look, how about this stamp album? Maybe I’ll take it to be valued. Some of these might bring in some money —’

  ‘Frances, please.’

  After all, it had been a bad idea. They seemed to finish up with more than they had started with. They put together one small bundle to be passed on to the vicar’s wife, and Frances’s mother, her cheeks sagging, carried off a few items for herself: school badges, a college scarf. Frances had found a model boat that Noel had built as a boy; he had named it after her. It made the tears stand in her eyes.

  Afterwards they were both rather quiet. They ate their lunch, then settled down at the open French windows. Frances’s mother put an upturned tray in her lap with paper, pens and ink on it: she had promised to write some letters, she said, for one of her charities. Frances darned stockings to the regular scratch and tap of her nib, but after fifteen minutes or so she became aware that the sound had ceased; her mother had fallen into a doze. Hastily putting down her mending and darting out of her chair, she was just able to catch the pen before it rolled out of her mother’s fingers. She screwed the cap back on the ink bottle, put it safely to one side. And as she stood gazing down at her mother’s slack, pale, undefended face, tears pricked at her eyes again.

  Oh, but it was pointless to be gloomy. She shook the tears away. What could she do with her afternoon? The darning was all very well, but she ought really to take advantage of her mother’s doze and do something grimy. The porch needed a sweep; that would be a good job done. It always made her mother twitchy to know she was out there with a broom, where any of the neighbours might stroll past and see her.

  But now there were sounds overhead: Lilian was up in her bedroom. Was she dressing to go out? No, the creaks didn’t suggest it. She was standing still, the boards wheezing with the shifting of her weight. What was she doing?

  It wouldn’t hurt, would it, to slip upstairs and find out?

  The bedroom door was wide open. Lilian called to her from beyond it the moment her step left the stair. ‘Is that you, Frances?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing
? Come in and see me.’

  Frances went in warily. It was still a shock to see her brothers’ room as it was now, cluttered with Lilian’s knick-knacks, hung with lace and swags of colour. The top of the chest of drawers was so crammed with scent bottles and powder-puffs and cold-creams that it looked like something from backstage at the Alhambra; over the swing-mirror a pair of newly washed pink silk stockings had been hung to dry. Lilian was standing beside the bed, gazing down at a lot of fashion papers that she had spread on the counterpane. She was making sketches, she said – trying out ideas. Her sister Netta was having a party in a couple of weeks’ time, and she planned to make herself a new frock for it.

  Frances looked the sketches over. They were good, she saw with surprise; at least as good, it seemed to her, as Stevie’s Bloomsbury designs. She said, ‘Why, you’re talented, Lilian. You’re an artist, in fact. Your mother said you were; I remember now. She was quite right.’

  Lilian answered modestly. ‘Oh, my family call you an artist if you put the clock on the left-hand side of the chimney-piece instead of in the middle.’ But she added, after a second, in a shyer sort of way, ‘I did want to be an artist, though, once upon a time. I used to go to picture galleries and places like that. I thought of taking classes at an art school.’

  ‘You ought to have done. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh —’ She laughed. ‘Well, I got married instead.’

  She picked up the drawings and held them at arm’s length, looking at them critically. Frances, watching her, said, ‘You might go to an art school now.’

  She brightened. ‘I might, mightn’t I?’ But she spoke without much conviction. ‘I don’t expect I’m good enough. And I know what Len would say! He’d call it a waste of time, and a waste of his money. He’s got money on the brain these days. He’s not coming to Netta’s party; he’s going to some stupid assurance men’s thing. He and Charlie are both going to it. A boys’ night out.’