The Paying Guests(100)

‘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.