The Paying Guests(169)

She lay and thought of her father, of her father’s ‘heart attacks’. She thought of the terrors that must have seized him over his failing fortune, his lost sons, his cross-grained, unmarriageable daughter; and she wept again.



For two or three days after that she gave herself over to the idea of invalidism. She didn’t dare venture out for the morning papers. Spencer Ward, for once, had to go un-thought-about, un-imagined; she couldn’t help it if the machinery sucked him in and crushed him. She kept to the sofa with worn old books from her childhood, Treasure Island and The Swiss Family Robinson. She took her tabloid at nine o’clock each night, and dropped straight into a dreamless sleep.

And then, on a Sunday morning, when she was least expecting it – when she had given up hoping for it, and was no longer sure that she even wanted it to happen – Lilian returned.

She had just cleared the breakfast table and was out in the scullery, washing up. When she heard the sound of a key going into the lock of the front door, she thought it was her mother, come back early from church. Puzzled, she called across the kitchen: ‘Is everything all right?’ There was no answer: only the tap, oddly uncertain, of heels on the floor.

Her heart made an unpleasant movement in her chest. Shaking the suds from her fingers she went out into the passage – and there was Lilian, in her widow’s coat and hat, with a suitcase in her hand, looking nothing at all like the sinister scheming creature that madness had made of her; looking sheepish, like a visitor who had stayed out too long; looking thin, looking pale, but, apart from that, looking achingly familiar and dear… Frances’s step faltered. She was horribly conscious of her own appearance, her face still puffy from her drugged, unnatural sleep, her hair unwashed, her clothes at their drabbest. She blotted her hands on her apron. ‘You ought to have let me know you were coming. I could have got myself ready for you.’

Lilian’s face fell slightly. ‘You don’t have to get yourself ready for me, do you?’

‘Got the house ready, then.’

‘Oh, but – No, it’s all right.’ Frances had come forward to take the suitcase from her. She swung and raised it, awkwardly; it struck Frances’s elbow with a hollow sound, and Frances realised that it was empty. She looked at Lilian, not understanding. But Lilian was blushing now. ‘I can’t keep borrowing Vera’s things,’ she said. ‘I – I’ve come to get some more clothes to take back to Walworth.’

So she hadn’t come back to stay… Frances felt a rush of the abandonment that had overwhelmed her a few nights before. The feeling was like a wailing infant suddenly thrust into her arms: she didn’t want it, couldn’t calm it, had nowhere to set it down. Without a word, she turned away, went out to the kitchen to remove her apron and wash her hands.

She took her time over it, doing all she could to press her mood into some more manageable shape. She supposed that Lilian would go on upstairs without her. But when she returned to the hall Lilian was still standing there, gazing upward but hesitating about starting the climb. ‘I just need to get my courage up,’ she said. ‘I’ve been dreading coming back. Will you – Will you go up ahead of me?’

Again Frances said nothing, but climbed the stairs at an ordinary pace, then stood in silence on the landing while Lilian cautiously followed.

They went into the sitting-room first. Lilian set down the case but made no move to take off her hat and coat. Instead she stood looking around like a wondering stranger.

‘It feels so long since I was here. It’s only a month. But everything seems different. Everything looks wrong. All these things. So many things… And everything with dust on it already.’ She had gone to the cold fireplace and was gazing at the clutter on the mantelpiece, the elephants, the tambourine, the caravan, all of it dulled, the bright surfaces clouded as if by gusts of sour breath.

Then she noticed the substantial pile of letters that had accumulated in her absence. She picked them up, and Frances said awkwardly, ‘I didn’t know what to do with them, whether to take them to you at your mother’s, or – I didn’t know when you’d be coming back.’

Lilian was going through the bundle with a look of dismay. ‘Most of them are for Len.’

‘Yes.’

‘I never thought of ordinary things like post still coming for him. But these others – I’ve had letters like these at Walworth. They’re from people who’ve read about me in the papers; they say all sorts of things. Unkind things, sometimes. I don’t open them any more.’

‘Leave them, then,’ said Frances. ‘I’ll burn them.’

She had been speaking flatly all this time, but Lilian didn’t appear to notice. She put the letters down, then stood like a stranger again. She seemed not to know what to do with herself. Frances offered to make her tea, but, no, she didn’t want that… Finally she closed her eyes tight and gave a shake of her head. ‘Oh, I knew if I came back I’d start to feel like this! While I’m at my mother’s it doesn’t seem real. About Len, I mean. But here, I’m still wondering where he is.’ She looked at Frances. ‘Aren’t you? I’m still expecting him to walk through the door. Then I have to remember that even if he did come – well, he’d have come from her, wouldn’t he? He’d been with her that night, the night it all happened. And, do you remember? When he thought I was seeing another man, he – he laughed. Just for a second, before he got angry. As if it was funny. I couldn’t think why he laughed like that. I know now. I —’