The Paying Guests(165)
16
She had the same uneasy mixture of feelings as the week wore on. Every morning she lay in bed, giddy again with sheer relief at the thought of the hours of liberty ahead of her; but every morning she made herself rise and dress and go down the hill to the news-stand, convinced that if she once let a day go by without thinking of Spencer Ward, without giving him her anxious attention, he would be lost. It was as if he were caught in a piece of machinery and only she could see it; as if all that was keeping him from the grinding cogs was her hand, hauling at his collar.
But every morning he seemed to have been tugged away from her by another half-inch.
‘DO WORSE TO HIM NEXT TIME’ appeared as a headline in two or three of the papers, the day after the police court hearing, along with SMILES IN DOCK and ‘OWED A WALLOP’. There were pictures of the boy being led to the prison van, one of him grinning full at the camera with his deplorable teeth, another of him attempting to shield his face in a spread-fingered style he could only, Frances thought, have got from American crook dramas he had seen at the cinema. On the Sunday there were dismal quotes from some of his Bermondsey neighbours: he’d been in and out of trouble since he was a lad, and during the War he had ‘run quite wild’. He had stolen a motor-car and overturned it on Streatham Common; he’d been involved in a ration-book racket; he’d gone on numerous pilfering sprees. His uncle, a railway porter, gave an interview to the News of the World asking for understanding. ‘There is no real harm in Spencer,’ he said. ‘He is the victim of circumstances. He was a sweet-tempered child, but has been a different character ever since the death of his father at Neuve Chapelle. A year ago we were in hopes that he was settling down, but then he met Miss Billie Grey and lost his head to her completely. She led him to believe that the two of them were engaged, and as far as I know she accepted his ring. But once she got to know Mr Leonard Barber it was a different story.’ He finished by saying: ‘I cannot believe that my nephew was capable of this despicable crime, and I cannot help but ask myself why Miss Grey is so keen to pin the blame for the murder upon him. I have stated my concerns in a letter to Scotland Yard, and am awaiting their reply.’
That sent Frances’s anxiety hurtling in a brand new direction. She recalled what Douglas had said about the girl and her sister having had some part in Leonard’s death. If they were to be blamed now, too —! When photographs of Billie began to appear in the press, she found herself poring over them in just the same tense way that, a week before, she had pored over those pictures of Lilian. They showed an ordinary face made cheaply pretty by bottle-blonded hair, by a darkened mouth and lashes, by eyebrows plucked into two thin arcs. ‘The Bermondsey femme fatale,’ was how the Express snidely described her; in a similar vein there were frequent mentions in all the papers of her ‘Tulse Hill trysts’ with Leonard – as if the south London settings somehow made the whole thing worse. But, oh, thought Frances, how squalid it was! What on earth had Leonard been thinking? Looking into the girl’s face, she recalled that moment in the starlit garden… And again she felt an odd sting of betrayal, at the thought that he had had such a secret; at the knowledge that he had been, at heart, a greater liar than she.
‘Oh, put them away!’ her mother pleaded, when she found her at the kitchen table with the newspapers spread out before her. ‘I can’t think why you persist in reading them. What good is all this brooding? Give yourself a rest from it, can’t you?’
‘How on earth can I rest?’ Frances answered – and she knew she was speaking all the more indignantly because resting was secretly what she longed and longed to do. ‘How can I rest while that boy’s in prison with all this hanging over his head?’
‘But surely it’s out of our hands now? Do you plan to follow the case all the way to the Old Bailey?’
She began to fold up the newspapers, and spoke stubbornly. ‘It won’t go as far as that.’
‘What do you mean? Why do you say that? We must hope that it does, mustn’t we? For the sake of Mr Barber’s family.’
‘It can’t go anywhere on no evidence.’
‘Oh, Frances, how contrary you are! The boy’s to be pitied, of course, but —’ Her mother’s tone grew delicate. ‘Well, from everything I’ve seen and read, he sounds a thoroughly nasty type.’
‘He’s a thug,’ said Frances bluntly. ‘But who turned him into one? The rest of us did. The War. Poverty. The papers themselves. The pictures! He comes from a world where killing a man is something to boast about. Can you blame him? A few years ago they were doling out medals for the same thing. And in any case, he could be the biggest thug in London – that doesn’t mean he killed Leonard.’
‘But if he didn’t do it,’ said her mother in perplexity, ‘then who did?’
And that, of course, was the one question that Frances could not answer – or, rather, the one question that she could answer, and, in answering, utterly resolve. That terror stirred in her again. She put the papers out of sight.
If only she could talk it through with Lilian. If only Lilian would come home… As the days passed, and there was no word from her, she began to want to see her, in the old, pure craving way. At last she gave in, and trudged back to Walworth. But she regretted it almost at once. Her visit had coincided with some break in Mr Viney’s working day: he was in the kitchen in his shirt-sleeves, eating fried bread and bacon. The little girl had just arrived home from school, and was full of the hardness of the playground. ‘Why do you keep coming here?’ she asked Frances loudly; and Frances could tell from the violence with which she was scolded that the others were wondering the same thing. She was wondering it herself. The craving for Lilian seemed to have disappeared at the first sight of her. She took Frances through to the parlour; the door was closed, they were left alone. But it was just as it had been at the police court: now that they had made their decision there seemed nothing more to say. The little over-furnished room was drab and oppressive. Lilian was again dressed in some gown of Vera’s, with her hair put up in combs.