The Paying Guests(108)

Her voice was sliding from disbelief into something like hysteria. Frances went over to her and took her in her arms. They embraced as best they could, one of them squatting, the other kneeling, a yard or so from Leonard’s stuck-up, splayed-out feet. Lilian pressed her face to Frances’s shoulder and moaned and moaned. But the embrace was as wrong, somehow, as Leonard’s lifeless body. Their fingers clutched, but their fear was between them, dark, electric. Their hearts were pounding, but pounding separately, each to its own horrified rhythm.

Frances couldn’t bear it. She broke free, turned away. Lilian was right: it couldn’t be true. She went back to Leonard’s body and tried again to revive him. There must be a way. There must be! He had lost all that blood, the yellow cushion was sodden with it; there were splashes of it all over the clutter of things on the carpet. But, even so, you couldn’t just die, not like that, not like this. And the wound itself, she saw, had ceased bleeding now. That could only be good – couldn’t it? A shock to his system might bring him round. A blow, a jolt. She saw a glass of water on the mantelpiece, and tried dashing a handful of it into his face. It mixed with the blood, that was all. She poured the rest of it into his mouth, moving aside his tongue to do it. But the water sat in there like water in a vase – horrible, horrible.

Setting the glass down with a shaking hand, she looked at the clock: ten past nine. She tried to pull her thoughts together. She closed her eyes for what felt like a moment, then looked at the clock again and found that two whole minutes had gone by.

She said, ‘We have to do something. I’ll have to get a doctor.’

Lilian trembled. ‘A doctor?’

‘I think it’s too late for one, but – What else can we do?’

‘But what will we tell him?’

‘I don’t know. The truth, I suppose.’

‘That I hit him?’

‘What else can we say?’

‘But we can’t tell him that! He’ll send for the police, won’t he?’

‘I think – I think he’ll have to.’

‘No, Frances. No. Oh, it can’t be true! He can’t be dead! There has to be something we can do.’ And again she took hold of him – caught at his hand, this time. ‘Len! Lenny!’ She squeezed and patted it. ‘Stop it, Lenny! Please! Help me, Frances. There has to be a way.’

She had hold of his other hand now. Now she was patting his thighs, his knees. The clock ticked on, unhurried but relentless. Frances tried to draw her back. ‘It’s no good. It’s no use.’

She continued to pat him. Her eyes and cheeks were wet with tears. ‘It isn’t true.’

‘It is. You know it is, Lilian. Stop it. We have to do something real. The longer we leave it, the odder it’ll look. The odder, I mean, it’ll look to the police —’

That made Lilian grow still. Gazing up at Frances, she spoke in a voice as small as a child’s.

‘You won’t say I hit him, will you?’

Frances swallowed. ‘They’ll have my word as well as yours that you didn’t mean it.’

‘They’ll say it was murder. They’ll hang me, Frances!’

‘They won’t do that. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t!’ But Frances’s voice had begun to tremble. Her heart seemed to be squirming in her breast. It was almost twenty past nine now. Another ten minutes gone! She drew a couple of shaky breaths. ‘We just have to be clear about what happened. So long as we’re clear, it’ll be all right. Leonard was attacking me, after all. I must have bruises – do I?’ She pulled down her collar. ‘Am I marked, here?’

Lilian looked at her throat without seeing it. ‘But they’ll want to know why we were fighting. They’ll find out about you and me. They’ll find out about the baby. I can’t go through with it, Frances. I can’t! There must be something we can do. Oh, I feel so ill, I think I’ll die! – No, Frances, wait!’ Frances had begun to move away. Lilian caught hold of her – her hand, her cuff. She was still on her knees. ‘There must be something, some other way. We’ve done so much to be together. They’ll keep us apart, I know they will. It isn’t fair! We’ve done so much!’

Her grip had all her fear in it. Her face was greeny-white. ‘Please, Frances. Please. Can’t we say something – anything? Can’t we say that – that he fell?’ She seized on the idea, her grip growing tighter. ‘Can’t we say he just fell and hit his head? If we were to move him on to his side, put something underneath him —’

‘But, put what?’ Frances gazed around in frustration. ‘There’s no fender. There’s nothing hard in the room at all. There’s only a thousand fancy cushions! Look at the wound, at all that blood! The doctor would know we were lying. It would need a step or a stone to make a wound like that.’

‘Well, then, suppose he’d fallen outside? We could say he came in, that we tried to help him. You remember that time, when someone hit him? He got himself back to the house that time, didn’t he? He was bleeding, then. We could say he did that – that he came in, and told us he’d fallen, and then just – just died —’

‘Oh, Lilian, be rational. He couldn’t have got anywhere with a wound like this. They’d never believe it.’