The Paying Guests(15)
‘The school’s shut for three days. Some naughty boys broke in and flooded it. She’s been at her studio instead. She has a new one, in Pimlico.’
They remained at the window for another few moments, then returned, in silence, to their places on the floor. The electric fire was grey now, ticking again as it cooled. Soon there were footsteps out on the landing, followed by the rattle of a latch-key being put into the lock of the door.
The door opened almost directly on to the room. ‘Hullo Stinker,’ said Christina, as Stevie appeared.
‘Hullo you,’ Stevie answered. And then: ‘Frances! Good to see you. Your day up in Town, is it?’
She was hatless and coatless and smoking a cigarette. Her short dark hair was brushed back from her forehead, completely against the fashion; her outfit was plain as a canvas overall, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, showing off her knobbly hands and wrists. But Frances was struck, as she always was, by the dash of her, the queer panache, the air she had of not caring if the world admired her or thought her an oddity. She had a hefty satchel over her shoulder, which she let fall with a thud as she approached the armchairs. She looked at the fire and the toasting-forks, smiling but wary.
‘What’s the idea? A nursery tea?’
‘Isn’t it shaming?’ said Christina. Her manner had changed with Stevie’s arrival, had become arch and brittle in a way Frances knew and disliked. ‘When poor Frances comes to see us she has to bring her own tuck. Aren’t we lucky she’s so clever! Swap you a slice for a couple of cigarettes?’
Stevie fished in a pocket for her case and lighter. ‘Done.’
She helped herself to a piece of the loaf, then sat down in the velveteen armchair, her knee just touching Christina’s shoulder. Her fingernails were dark with clay, Frances could see now, and there was a dirty thumb-print like a bruise at her left temple. Christina noticed the thumb-print too, and reached up to rub it away.
‘You look like a chimney-sweep, Stevie.’
‘And you,’ said Stevie, surveying with satisfaction Christina’s unpressed clothes, ‘look like a chimney-sweep’s trollop.’ She took a large bite of cake. ‘Aside from your hair, that is. What do you think of it, Frances?’
Frances was lighting a cigarette. Christina answered for her. ‘She hates it, of course.’
Frances said, ‘I don’t hate it at all. It’d cause a stir on Champion Hill, though.’
Christina snorted. ‘Well, that’s a point in its favour, in my book. Stevie and I were in Hammersmith last week. The stares I got were out of this world! No one said a word, of course.’
‘No one would, to your face,’ said Stevie, ‘in a place like that.’ She polished off her slice of cake and licked her dirty thumb and fingers. ‘I lived on the Brompton Road once, you know, Frances. The gentility – my God! My neighbour was a man who worked for one of the big shipping firms. His wife kept a Bible in the window. Church three times on a Sunday, all that. But at night, I’d hear them through the walls, practically hurling the fire irons at each other! That’s the clerk class for you. They look tame. They sound tame. But under those doilies and antimacassars they’re still rough as all hell. No, give me good honest slum people over people like that, any day. At least they have their brawls in the open.’
Christina put out a foot and nudged Frances with her toes. ‘You taking note?’ To Stevie she explained, ‘Frances has her own little clerk now, and her own little clerk’s wife…’
Stevie listened to the story of the coming of the Barbers with the sort of wincing expression with which she might have heard out the symptoms of some embarrassing disease. As soon as she could, Frances turned the conversation. How were things, she asked, in the giddy world of ceramics? Stevie answered at length, telling her about a couple of new designs she was trying out. They were nothing avant-garde, unfortunately. No one wanted experiment any more; the art-buying public had become frightfully conservative since the War. But she was doing what she could to push the figurative into the abstract… She leaned over the side of the armchair to fetch a book from her satchel, found pictures and passages to illustrate what she meant, even made a couple of quick sketches for Frances’s benefit.
Frances nodded and murmured, glancing now and then at Christina; she was looking on, saying little, fiddling with the lace of one of Stevie’s polished flat brown shoes. With her head tilted forward, the line of her fringe seemed blunter than ever, and the curls in front of her ears looked so flat and so pointed they might have been the blades of can-openers. In the old days, her hair had been long; she had worn it puffed around her head in a way that had always made Frances think, fondly, of a marigold. She’d had that marigold hairstyle the very first time Frances had caught sight of her, on a drizzly day in Hyde Park. She had been nineteen, Frances twenty. God, how distant that seemed! Or, no, not distant, but a different life, a different age, as unlike this one as pepper was salt. There had been a pearl brooch on her lapel, and one of her gloves had had a rip in it, showing the pink palm underneath. My heart fell out of me and into that rip, Frances had used to tell her, later.
Stevie ran out of steam at last. Frances seized the opportunity to rise and gather together the tea-things, visit the landing, wash her hands. ‘Thanks for the smoke,’ she said, as she pinned on her hat.
Stevie offered her case. ‘Why not take one or two with you? They must make a change from those gaspers of yours.’