The Paying Guests(173)
Lilian she saw only once as the fortnight passed, early in the second week. They didn’t mention the appalling way in which they had last parted. They didn’t mention that meeting at all. Lilian’s expression was a closed one, her manner quite dead; they came together at the request of one of the solicitors, sitting with him in an upstairs office while he ran for a final time through their recollections of the night of Leonard’s death. Frances was afraid, at first, that he meant to ask her to be a witness: she imagined having to stand and give evidence for the prosecution, gazing across at the boy as she did it. But it was only Lilian he wanted for that. He was sorry to request it, he told her, but they wouldn’t keep her in the box for long. Mr Ives, the counsel to whom the case had been handed, simply needed her to confirm a few details about her husband’s final day, and would perhaps just touch on her recollections of that night in July when he had been injured… They might have heard of Humphrey Ives, KC? His name was often in the papers. He was a most experienced advocate, a very able chap indeed, and with his involvement the trial shouldn’t take longer than three days; it ‘might just squeak to a fourth’ if the defending barrister, Mr Tresillian, proved tricky. He was rather an untried man – a junior, who had accepted the brief at a nominal fee, and one never knew with fellows like that. Sometimes they were in a tearing hurry, other times they liked to make a bit of a splash by ‘going down kicking’. But Mrs Barber must keep her mind on the certain outcome. Mr Ives had let it be known that he’d rarely seen so straightforward a case.
He meant, of course, to be reassuring. But once the two of them had left his building they paused on the pavement, speechless.
‘Three or four days!’ managed Frances at last. ‘Will you be all right, having to give evidence?’ And then, when Lilian didn’t answer: ‘You needn’t stay there once you’ve done it. I can see to it all, when the time comes. If it comes, I mean. The moment the verdict’s returned, if it’s the wrong one, I can go to this Mr Tresillian and —’
‘You think I’d let you do that for me, too?’ said Lilian, coldly. ‘No, I want to be there for the whole of it. I want to be ready. I’ve told my family I want to be there, and that’s that. And —’ A touch of colour crept into her face, and into her tone. ‘I’ve told them I want you beside me in the court. Is that all right? I’ve said I want you, and no one else.’
Frances looked at her. ‘You told them that? They – They didn’t think it odd?’
The life left her again. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now, does it?’
And, no, thought Frances, it didn’t matter now, not if they could stand here like this, with a sort of sheet of ice between them. Not if Lilian could look back at her with such wounded, lightless eyes, as if they’d never kissed, lain naked together, lost themselves in each other’s gazes… She searched for words, and couldn’t find them. They made their final arrangements, and parted.
November the first, November the second: the days slithered by. She went to the cinema with her mother; she forgot the film the moment it ended. She paid a visit to Christina, but sat there with nothing to say. At home she gave herself over to chores, wanting to put the house in order before the trial began; but the chores, she realised, were a losing battle. The house had begun to fall apart. The geyser shrieked as it burned. Paint was peeling from window frames and revealing them to be rotten. The scullery roof had sprung a leak: she put down a bowl to catch the drips, but the rainwater spread and darkened, to make treasure maps and Whistler nocturnes of the walls and ceiling. It was just as if the house were suddenly as weary as she was. Or as if it could sense that the jig was up: that their little contract was about to expire. Perhaps, all this time, it had only ever been humouring her, politely.
She worried most about her mother. What would become of her? How would she cope? Would there even be time to explain it, on the day, if the worst happened? Once she and Lilian had stepped forward, wouldn’t the police want to take them into custody right away? Her mother might hear of it from a newspaper! No, that wasn’t to be borne. Night after night she fretted about it. She wondered if her brothers had used to feel like this, on leave from the War. Noel, she remembered, had given her a letter to be handed to her mother in the case of his death; her mother had taken the letter, tucked it away, never referred to it again. It crossed her mind to leave a similar sort of note, ‘To be opened in the event of my not returning from the Old Bailey’ – Oh, but that was too sensational, surely.
Then she thought of Mrs Playfair. The thought came like an answer to a prayer. For Mrs Playfair, of course, could be reached by telephone from the court, and she would see to everything, get Frances’s mother to the police station, handle any newspaper men. And if, at the end of it all, Frances were put into prison or – or worse, then she could be relied upon to take charge of her mother’s finances, help her find new lodgers for the house. She might even put the house up for sale and have her mother to live with her over at Braemar. Yes, the more Frances thought about it, the more likely that seemed. The vision was not quite a happy one. She saw her mother dwindling into some sort of unpaid companion, reading aloud from parish newsletters, winding balls of wool. But better that than being left alone, to brood on her daughter’s disgrace. God! How incredible it was, to think of them being on the brink of such ruin! Two months before, she had been ready to turn her back on her mother, to walk away from the house. But that had been for something, hadn’t it? That had been for Lilian, for love; not for this chaos of bad luck and blunder.