The Paying Guests(148)
Frances put an arm around her, kissed the side of her pale face. ‘Just be careful, when the inspector comes. Don’t let him catch you out. We’ve come so far; we can keep going, I know we can… But you won’t think again about – about what you said? Telling the truth? You won’t think of it?’
Lilian hesitated, then shook her head. ‘Not if you don’t think I ought to.’
They hauled themselves upright, stood close for a minute, and kissed with dry, clumsy mouths before they parted.
Out on the pavement, Frances blinked against the daylight. A man was standing at the window of the shop, looking over the display, and in the blindness of the moment she just avoided colliding with him. She caught his eye in the dusty glass, mumbled an apology and moved on.
But after a second or two she looked back, to see him stepping rapidly away in the opposite direction. He was dressed in a buckled grey mackintosh, she realised now. Was he the man she had passed earlier, on her way down the hill? She wasn’t sure; but the thought set her panicking again. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but wasn’t it possible that Inspector Kemp had put men to watch the house? Men to follow her when she left it? Perhaps they’d been doing it all week. How else, after all, would he have known to find her on her own today? And she had done just what he’d wanted her to do! Gone rushing off to Lilian! Gone to Lilian, to get to her first, because he had taken care to let her know that he would be coming here later himself…
She headed home feeling sick, feeling trapped and exposed – now and then, as she crossed a road, furtively turning her head to glance back over her shoulder. But there was no further sign of the man in the mackintosh.
14
Two days later, the funeral took place. Frances had planned to attend it with her mother. But her mother rose in the morning looking more burdened and fretful than ever, and complaining of a sore throat; so she went alone, walking gloomily to Peckham through the sunless, shadowless streets, then taking a bus to the cemetery gates. She found a crowd of black-clad figures there, waiting for the cortège to arrive. She recognised aunties and cousins from Netta’s party; she shook one or two hands. When the motor-hearse and cars appeared she strained for a sight of Lilian, catching only the merest glimpse of her as the vehicles crept by. The last of the cars entered the cemetery, and she and the other mourners moved silently to follow. It took about ten minutes, then, on a winding road through the graves, to reach the dour little chapel where the service was to be held.
The atmosphere, in the circumstances, could not have been anything other than grim. The coffin was set on trestles in the aisle; gingery with brass and varnish, it was disconcertingly reminiscent of Leonard himself, and the floral wreaths that were placed on it – one marked BROTHER, the other SON – recalled the awful untimeliness of his death. People wept into their handkerchiefs as the minister gave his address. Frances, afraid of where grief would lead her, feeling their tears as a sort of contagion, sat as rigidly among them as if she were holding her breath.
But there was something else to the occasion, she began to realise, some extra current in the general distress: she saw it in the closed, set faces of Leonard’s family; she saw it in the oddly challenging way in which, when it was time to leave the chapel, the Barber men rose to shoulder the coffin. On the slow walk to the grave, the mourners, like vinegar and oil, somehow divided themselves into two distinct streams. And at the grave itself the streams pooled, with the Peckham crowd gathering on one side and the Walworth crowd gathering on the other, and only a few individuals – men who might have been colleagues of Leonard’s from the insurance business or, perhaps, had fought alongside him in the War – looking bewildered about where their loyalties lay. Frances didn’t care whom she stood with. She simply wanted the thing to be over. She kept trying for more glimpses of Lilian; she could see only her bowed head and shoulders, shaking with sobs as the coffin went down. As soon as the minister had uttered the closing blessing and the mourners began to disperse, she tried to pick her way through the grim-faced crowd towards her.
But, as if the tension that had been simmering just below the surface of the whole affair had at last been allowed its release, she had barely taken a dozen steps before she became aware of a small commotion at the head of the grave. Those family wreaths, SON and BROTHER, had been placed prominently among the flowers, but Vera and Netta, it seemed, were attempting to move them in favour of a large sheaf of lilies. Leonard’s mother, and another woman who must have been a sister or sister-in-law, had hold of the stems of the lilies and, with white, determined expressions, were trying to tug them from Netta’s hands.
It was all done in silence, but the dumb-show hostility was as shocking as a shout. People had turned to watch, open-mouthed; no one seemed to know what to do. Mrs Viney, scarlet and furious, was heading back to the grave as though she intended to join in the fight. Lilian was pulling on one of her arms: ‘Leave it, Mum. Oh, it isn’t worth it!’
A couple of the cousins stood near by, along with Min and Min’s young man. Frances joined them. ‘What on earth’s going on?’
At the sight of her, Min’s hand flew to her mouth and she let out a burst of nervous laughter. ‘Oh, Miss Wray, isn’t it awful! Lenny’s mum won’t let Lil’s flowers be put at the top of the grave!’
‘But why not?’