The Paying Guests(13)
She brought the loaf out, undid its string, parted its paper. Christina saw the glossy brown crust of it and her blue eyes widened like a child’s. There was only one thing to do with a cake like that, she said, and that was to toast it. She set a kettle on the gas-ring for tea, then rummaged about in a cupboard for an electric fire.
‘Sit down while this warms up,’ she said, as the fire began to tick and hum. ‘Oh, but let some air in, would you, so we don’t swelter.’
Frances had to move a colander from the window-sill in order to raise the sash. The room was large and light, decorated in fashionable Bohemian colours, but there were untidy piles of books and papers on the floor, and nothing was where it ought to be. The armchairs were comedy-Victorian, one of scuffed red leather, the other of balding velveteen. The velveteen one had a tray balanced on it, bearing the remains of two breakfasts: sticky egg cups and dirty mugs. She passed the tray to Christina, who cleared it, gave it a wipe, set it with cups, saucers, plates and a smeary bottle of milk, and handed it back. The mugs, the egg cups, the cups and saucers, were all of pottery, heavily glazed, thickly made – all of it with a rather ‘primitive’ finish. Christina shared this flat with another woman, Stevie. Stevie was a teacher in the art department of a girls’ school in Camden Town, but was trying to make a name for herself as a maker of ceramics.
Frances did not dislike Stevie exactly, but she generally timed her visits so that they fell inside school hours; it was Chrissy she came to see. The two of them had known each other since the mid-point of the War. With the coming of Peace, perversely, they had parted on bad terms, but fate had brought them back together – fate, or chance, or whatever it was that, one day last September, had sent Frances into the National Gallery to escape a torrent of rain, had nudged her out of the Flemish rooms and into the Italian, where she had come upon Christina, as sodden as herself, gazing with a mixed expression at Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. There had been no chance of a retreat. While Frances had stood there, disconcerted, Christina had turned, and their eyes had met; after the first awkwardness, the more-than-coincidence of it had been impossible to resist, and now they saw each other two or three times a month. Their friendship sometimes struck Frances as being like a piece of soap – like a piece of ancient kitchen soap that had got worn to the shape of her hand, but which had been dropped to the floor so many times it was never quite free of its bits of cinder.
Today, for example, she saw that Christina had re-styled her hair. The hair had been short at their last meeting, a fortnight before; now it was even more severely shingled at the back, with a straight fringe halfway up Christina’s forehead and two flat, pointed curls in front of her ears. Rather wilfully eccentric, Frances thought the style. She thought the same of Christina’s frock, which was a swirl of muddy pinks and greys, and matched the Bloomsbury walls. She thought it of the walls, for that matter; of the whole untidy flat. She never came here without looking at the disorder of it all in a mixture of envy and despair, imagining the cool, calm, ordered place the rooms would be if they were hers.
She didn’t mention the haircut. She closed her eyes to the mess. The kettle came to the boil and Christina filled the teapot, cut the cake into slices, produced butter, knives and two brass toasting-forks. ‘Let’s sit on the floor and do it properly,’ she said, so they pushed back the armchairs and made themselves comfortable on the rug. Frances’s fork had Mother Shipton for its handle. Christina’s had a cat that was playing a fiddle. The bars of the fire had turned from grey to pink to glowing orange, and smelt powerfully of scorching dust.
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.’