The Paying Guests(107)

Still keeping the cushion in place, she patted him. ‘Leonard. Leonard!’ She wanted to get some response from him, something ordinary and undreadful.

‘Oh, make him wake up!’ wailed Lilian. She’d begun, in fear, to weep again.

Frances shook his shoulder. ‘Leonard. Len. Can you hear me?’

But she couldn’t rouse him. When she shook him more roughly, it simply jolted a thicker sort of spittle from his mouth. The horrible breaths went on and on. She looked at Lilian. ‘What on earth were you thinking?’

Lilian was shaking like a hare. ‘I wasn’t thinking anything! I was just trying to get him to stop. He was throttling you, wasn’t he? I tried hitting him with my hands and it didn’t do any good.’

‘But why did you pick up the ashtray?’

‘I don’t know! There was nothing else.’

‘But to hit him on the head, Lilian!’

‘I didn’t mean to. I swear. I just swung it. I didn’t mean —’ She gazed down at her quivering hands, then pulled at her sleeve, showing Frances. ‘Look!’ The sleeve had a long streak of ash on it. ‘I knew I oughtn’t to hit him with the ashy end, you see, in case it dirtied his coat. That shows I didn’t mean to hurt him, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that show it?’ Her gaze returned to Leonard. ‘Oh, God, there’s so much blood! How can there be so much blood? And why won’t he wake up?’

‘He’s unconscious,’ said Frances. She still had the cushion pressed in place. She was frightened to lift it. She was frightened to move.

‘There’s so much blood,’ repeated Lilian. ‘It’s all over his clothes. It’s going to get everywhere. Oh, why does he sound like that? Why won’t he —’

She stopped. Something had changed. Something new had happened to him. He had taken one of those atrocious breaths, but this time the air, as it came out of him, sounded different, was noisier, wetter. ‘Len?’ she said, leaning over him. Frances peered again into his face. The breath came on and on, bubbling around the point of his tongue. They saw his back and shoulders sinking, and watched for them to rise again. But they did not rise. The bubbling ceased, and gave way to a terrible silence.

‘Len?’ repeated Lilian, less certainly than before.

Frances pushed her out of the way. Leaving the cushion sitting in place, she drew back the bunched-up collar of his coat and felt at his neck for a pulse. His flesh was hot and sweaty and seemed full of life, but she could find no beat of blood in it. She laid her ear against his overcoated back, moving about from one spot to another; again, the heat was streaming from him, but she heard no heartbeat save her own terrified one. She caught sight of Lilian’s powder-compact in the mess of things on the floor. She ran and got it, and unclasped it, and held its mirror to his misshapen mouth. She held it for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty; it remained unmisted.

She couldn’t believe it. Still keeping the cushion clamped to his head, she heaved him over on to his back. A single, breathy groan came out of him, that made Lilian scuttle close to him and call his name again. But the groan was oddly inanimate, like the gust of air that might rise from the neck of a thrown-down bag, and his limbs lay where they had landed, as if not quite connected to the rest of him. Frances got hold of his arms and lifted them, and let them fall again. She tried pushing at his chest, at his stomach – anything to get air into his lungs. But even in the short space of time that she had spent attempting to rouse him it seemed to her that the surface of his partly open eyes, and of his lips and pink tongue, had lost some of their wetness. He’d become not a man, but something resembling a man, something bulky and empty and wrong.

She sat back on her heels. The room still seemed to be ringing with his voice. She could still feel the grip of his hand in her armpit, the weight of his body against hers. But, ‘Lily,’ she said, in a whisper, ‘I think he’s dead. I think you’ve killed him.’

Lilian stared as if not understanding. Then her face crumpled. ‘No! He can’t be! He just can’t! He’s fooling, to tease us!’ She went back to him, took hold of him. ‘Lenny! Wake up! Come on! It isn’t funny! Stop it, Lenny! You’re frightening me. You’re frightening Frances. We didn’t mean it, what we said before. It wasn’t true. We didn’t mean it. Please! Oh, please wake up!’

But even as she begged, the urgency began to fade from her voice. She must have been struck, as Frances had been, by the transformation, the wrongness of him. ‘Please, oh, please,’ she kept saying; but the word became mechanical, meaningless. At last she fell silent, and took her hand from him, and looked at him in horror.

Then she looked at Frances. ‘What are we going to do?’

Frances was still catching her breath. There was blood on her fingers, sticky. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But he can’t – I didn’t – Oh, what will his mum and dad say!’ The thought sent her back to him in terror. ‘Oh, what have I done? I can’t believe it. He can’t be dead. He can’t be! You can’t die from something like that! Lenny, wake up! Oh, look at all the blood on his clothes! It can’t be true. He can’t be dead. He went through the War, Frances! Oh, why did he have to come home? And why did you have to tell him, about you and me? Oh, God, it’s like an awful dream!’