The Paying Guests(174)

It was that that made her cry, sometimes: the sheer waste and futility of it. She would turn her face to her pillow, her arms drawn in, holding nothing.



And then it was the eve of the trial, Guy Fawkes Day. It fell on a Sunday this year, so there were no bonfires – that seemed to her a pity – but early in the evening a few rockets went up in defiance of the sabbath; she stood at the window in her darkened bedroom and watched the colours burst and die. She gathered her things for the morning, and when, later, she climbed into bed, she prepared herself for a sleepless night. But perhaps she really had reached the limits of her own fear now: she slept quite dreamlessly, awoke feeling no more than mildly apprehensive, and she washed and dressed, and ate a breakfast, with only the sick, fluttery feeling she could remember from the mornings of examination days at school. It proved difficult, when it came to it, to part from her mother with a bright goodbye – though, after all, not that difficult, because this was only the beginning, and there were still two or three more goodbyes to come. For the same reason, as she made the walk down to Camberwell and along the Walworth Road, though she tried to gaze at everything in the knowledge that she might soon be taken away from it, she couldn’t keep it up, she felt mannered and inauthentic – like an actress, she thought, playing a character to whom the doctor had just delivered the fatal diagnosis.

At Mrs Viney’s, Lydia was guarding the door and the dog was barking, exactly as usual. Lilian was ready in a smart hat and coat – but so were her sisters and her mother. They didn’t want her to go without them. It wasn’t right. What was she thinking? Say she was to be taken ill? Suppose she was to fall in a faint again? It wasn’t fair on poor Miss Wray! Or, why not telephone to Lloyd? There was still the time for it. He’d bring her home the moment she’d got through the nasty business in the court. And later on Lydia would run for the evening papers and —

‘No,’ said Lilian. ‘No.’ Her hat had a veil to it; she drew it down. ‘This is how I want to do it. He was my husband, wasn’t he? This is how it’s going to be.’ And her tone was so final, so forbidding, that her sisters fell silent; even her mother was abashed.

They insisted on seeing her down to the street, however, once the taxi had arrived. A couple of reporters and photographers were down there too, and some of the passers-by paused; customers came out of Mr Viney’s shop to watch her leave and to wish her well. ‘It’s like when I got married,’ she murmured, gazing out from the taxi window at the waves of the small, forlorn crowd. But she spoke to the glass rather than to Frances, and once the vehicle had started forward she didn’t speak again. Her coat was a new one, stiff and black with a greenish beetly sheen to it. Behind her widow’s veil, her face looked blurry and remote. Frances was dressed in her soberest costume, the grey tunic, a darker grey coat. She had cleaned and polished her worn black boots – as if polished boots, she thought, gazing down at the toes of them, could make a difference.

The first shock came when they’d crossed the river and were taking the turn off Ludgate Hill. They found a queue stretching down the street from the public entrance of the Old Bailey, not the scrum of people they’d grown used to but a solid line of ordinary men and women with bags and scarves and neatly furled umbrellas. ‘They can’t all be here for us,’ said Frances, ‘surely?’ But even as she said it the faces began to turn, and she saw a shudder of excitement run the length of the queue as Lilian was recognised. By the time the taxi had pulled up at the kerb people were straining for a proper look at her, and policemen were gesturing them back. She fumbled with coins for the driver, and they got themselves into the building as quickly as they could.

But here was the next shock: the scale and grandeur of it all. A flight of stairs took them up to an impressive lobby; a second staircase led to a domed marble hall that was hectic with decoration and as dwarfing as the nave of a cathedral. They stood in it at an absolute loss, until an official took charge of them. Mrs Barber was to give evidence? She was to come with him, please. There was a waiting-place for witnesses; she would have to remain there until she was called. The other lady could go straight to the courtroom. The policeman at the door would let her through.

So they were separated at once, and Frances went into the court alone. And though for a minute it was all right – the room, she thought, was simply another of the brown panelled chambers in which she had spent so much time for the inquest and the police court hearings, and the bench to which she was led, beneath the jut of the public gallery, had Leonard’s father, and brother Douglas, and Uncle Ted already on it, rising gravely to shake her hand – though at first it seemed all right, once she was seated, and could look around, she saw that it wasn’t all right at all. There was no grubbiness here, no bluster: it was the real thing, at last. The clerks and barristers, in their wigs and gowns, were like crafty jackdaws. The chair for the judge had a sword above it. The dock for the prisoner – But that was the worst. Men had been sent to their deaths from there. Hadn’t Crippen stood there? And Seddon? And George Smith?

A stir overhead, out of sight, made her flinch. The doors to the gallery must have been thrown open. There came a rush of footsteps and excited voices as people piled in from the street; they settled down with the protests and shufflings-along of a phantom music-hall audience. Or perhaps it was she herself who was the phantom. How little her thumping heart mattered to any of this, after all! For soon, without warning, without any sort of signal appearing to be have been made, the room, which so far had had a sort of looseness to it, began to knit itself together. Men moved in different directions, taking places at benches and desks; overhead, the invisible audience became hushed and poised. The order was given for the court to rise, and she scrambled to her feet. A gowned official stepped smoothly to a small door beside the judge’s dais. There was some sort of proclamation, there were the raps of a staff or a gavel: they sounded to her like the measured, unnatural raps of the dead on a seance table. And then the judge was admitted, a frightful figure, his robe a bright, bright scarlet; he carried, bafflingly, grotesquely, a posy of flowers. Three other robed men came with him, one in a gold chain of office. They mounted the dais, took their places, and – Where was Lilian? She wanted Lilian! – the thing had begun.