The Paying Guests(168)
Then, from nowhere, there came a whisper: Five hundred pounds… The fact was, the swing of that ashtray had made Lilian a wealthy woman. The fact was, Lilian had done rather nicely out of the whole affair. She had rid herself of an unwanted child. She had rid herself of an unwanted husband. She had pinned the blame on an innocent boy —
And I helped her with every stage of it, thought Frances in a panic. I even carted Leonard’s body down the stairs for her!
She lay there in the darkness, turning it over in her mind. She could recollect times – she was sure she could – when Lilian had wished Leonard dead. Oh, why can’t some nice fat bus just run him over! Oh, if only he would just die! She forgot that there were times when she had wished him dead herself.
Then, with a dreadful jolt, she thought of the letter that Lilian had once written her. Didn’t that letter have something in it? Some desire, some plea?
She lit a candle, got out of bed, went shivering across to her chest of drawers to fish out the box in which, sentimentally, she kept the tokens of their love affair. There they all were, the silk forget-me-nots, the slips of paper with the kisses and the hearts: they looked childish, grotesque. Right at the bottom was the letter. She took it out of its envelope. What a scrap it was, after all! Mawkish and badly written. She found the lines she had remembered. If it isnt then tell me & make me believe it because I feel right now that I am ready to do any desperate thing to be with you – Her heart leapt into her throat. I am ready to do any desperate thing… Lilian had written those words after finding those tickets in Leonard’s pocket, in the knowledge that she had started a baby by him. Had she written them in spite? Had she written them in calculation? Had she planned the whole thing, even then?
But then, Frances asked herself, how do I know for sure that the baby was even Leonard’s? Leonard had doubted it, hadn’t he? Maybe he’d been right! Lilian was unfaithful to him; why shouldn’t she also have been unfaithful to me? She looked again at the letter – and this time a different line caught her eye. You said I like to be admired… You said I would love anybody who admired me… Now her mind ran over those admirers of Lilian’s, the lady-killer in the park, the men in trains lowering their newspapers for a better look at her. She remembered the cousins she had danced with so freely at Netta’s party. She remembered curly-haired Ewart. ‘If she was my wife, I’d smack her behind.’ So, even he had seen it! There must be something about Lilian – mustn’t there? There must be something instinctual, something almost morbid, something like an unhealthy perfume, that drew those men, those boys? Drew Frances herself?
In a sort of fever now, she took the letter and the box over to the hearth, tipped it all into the grate and put a match to it. She couldn’t have things like that in the house! Suppose the police should find them! She watched the papers being eaten by the flame and, for a moment, grew calmer. Then her mind began racing again. What else was there to incriminate her? The china caravan, next door? She thought seriously of fetching it and smashing it up. Then she remembered the half-button that she had found in the kitchen passage, that might or might not have been pulled from Leonard’s cuff. She had pushed it into the earth of the aspidistra plant. That was a crazy thing to have done! She ought to have taken the button away from the house – right away somewhere. She ought to have dropped it into the Thames! If the police should come —!
The police wouldn’t come, so long as Spencer Ward was in prison. But she had got to a point almost of madness now. It seemed to her quite possible that Lilian might go to Inspector Kemp and tell him some sort of tale against her. She might have gone to him already. He might be on his way to the house. Didn’t they come in the early morning? Wasn’t that how they did it?
It was ten to six, and pitch dark. She was shivering right through. But she put on her dressing-gown and slippers, picked up her candle, stole downstairs, and – quietly, quietly, thinking of her mother, asleep near by – she lifted the aspidistra from its spot beside the dinner-gong and carried it out to the kitchen table. It was trickier than she’d expected to get hold of the button. She couldn’t reach it with the blade of a knife; she had to tip the pot, scrabble in the earth with her fingers. The dusty leaves got into her face, sharp and hard against her eyes. The earth began to spill, but she kept on digging, growing more and more anxious, feeling more and more desperate – until the pot fell noisily sideways and the plant came free, a mass of dirt and writhing white roots. The button came tumbling out along with everything else: just a black half-button it was, like a thousand others in the house, probably not from Leonard at all. The sight of it broke the spell of her insanity; she covered her face and started to cry.
When she looked up a few minutes later, her mother was there, gazing at her from the kitchen doorway. ‘Frances, good heavens! What on earth’s the matter?’
Frances shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said, as she sobbed and sobbed into her dirty fingers. ‘Nothing.’
She spent that day in bed. Her mother brought her tea and aspirin, along with ill-cooked little meals: rubbery buttered eggs, collapsed potatoes. After lunch there was a tap at the bedroom door and in came the family physician, an elderly man named Dr Lawrence. Her mother must have sent one of the tradesmen’s boys to him with a note. He took her blood-pressure, and listened to her heart, and felt beneath her jaw with his warm, dry fingers. ‘Any giddiness?’ he asked her. ‘Fainting spells? Shortness of breath?’ She shook her head at every question, embarrassed about her tattered nightgown, worried about how much his visit was costing. But his manner was so mild, so unsuspecting, that her eyes filled with tears. He patted her hand, then spoke quietly to her mother out on the landing. ‘Nerve strain’ was his conclusion, perhaps a delayed response to the War, and to the deaths in the family, all aggravated by recent upsets. Frances must rest, avoid excitements… He left her a jar of tabloids to be taken at bedtime.