The Paying Guests(181)
‘Last week, when I heard how black things had got for the boy. I’d had a month of looking out my window, seeing his poor mother – I couldn’t live with myself.’
‘And the police, I imagine, spoke with your employers?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘With what result?’
‘I was given my marching orders.’
‘Your position lost, your good name tarnished. Just what you had anticipated, in fact. And yet, you still felt it your duty to come forward?’
The man looked sour again. ‘I did. I don’t like the boy. No one in our building does. I can’t speak for anything else he might have done or not done. He might want hanging ten times over for all I know about it. But as far as the murder of this Mr Barber goes, he doesn’t want hanging for that, for he was at home with his mother all that evening long, and nothing could make me tell you he wasn’t, though I should be hanged for it my —’
Myself, Frances knew he was going to finish. But from the corner of her eye she had seen Douglas rise and lean forward, and now he shouted at the man in a fury: ‘Liar!’
There were exclamations, protests. His father and uncle attempted to restrain him; he shook off their hands and shouted again, more hoarsely. ‘Liar!’ He spoke to the jury: ‘He’s been put up to this! He’s been paid to do it! Can’t you see?’
The judge called sternly for him to be silent. Faces peered over the balcony, a woolly scarf dangled. Spencer looked on open-mouthed, showing all his dreadful teeth. A policeman came across the well of the court, and at his approach Douglas gave a snort of disgust but grew calmer and, with a flick of the tails of his overcoat, sat back down. And by the time the room had settled, Frances understood that the force of the man’s evidence had been dispelled. Mr Ives rose to cross-examine him, and he grew truculent again, and looked seedy and dishonest; his little moment of nobility, she realised, had come and gone. But they had to believe him, didn’t they? He had been brave. He had been brave where she and Lilian had been cowards. They had to believe him! She gazed from face to face, desperate to see some change in people’s expressions. But the faces remained closed to her. The mechanism of the trial had stuttered and jammed for a moment, but was already running smooth again.
She couldn’t listen to the final few witnesses. When it was time to leave the court, she found that she was trembling. Lilian’s face was whiter than ever. The mix of feelings was too much, the slim new chance almost unwelcome; it had been easier to remain in despair. They got down to the street and hailed a taxi, but she didn’t want to be still, not even for the brief ride to Walworth. She didn’t want to have to speak, in case all that came out of her were tears. She saw Lilian into the cab, then shook her head and drew back. She closed the door, and if Lilian called to her to wait, the words were lost. She began to walk. The rain had turned to a fine drizzle, and the pavements were slimy. Her boots began to let in the filthy water at once. But as she made the long journey home to Champion Hill she felt what she had tried and failed to feel the day before: she looked at the city and was sick with love for it, sick with yearning to remain a part of it, to remain alive and young and unconfined and bursting with sensation. Her tired muscles began to ache, but even the ache was dear to her, even the blisters on her heels. She’d be a thing of aches and blisters for the rest of her days, she thought; she’d ask for nothing, trouble no one; if only they’d let her keep her freedom, if only they’d let her keep her life.
By the time she arrived at the house the fizz of her feelings had begun to subside. Her mother exclaimed at the sight of her, hurried her out of her wet things. She warmed herself at the kitchen stove, washed the dirt from her feet, stuffed newspaper into her boots, put her coat and hat to dry. But when she went up to her bedroom, the spell of the walk was still on her. She lit a lamp, drew on clean clothes, then stood and gazed around the neat, plain room with passionate eyes. Who would love these things when she was gone? What would they mean to anyone else? The candlesticks, the photographs of her brothers, the prints on the wall, the books —
Her eye was caught by Anna Karenina. She drew it free, and opened it up at the page at which she’d left a marker: the scene at the Moscow station, Anna stepping down from the train.
She took the lamp, and crossed the landing, and went into the sitting-room.
She thought she had gone in there looking for Lilian. But this time the things she noticed all belonged to Leonard, his leather writing-case on the shelf, the battered box of Snakes and Ladders, his tennis racket, still in its frame, ready for the next tournament. Had they been real, those matches of his? Or had he spent the days with Billie? Had he loved her, as she’d loved Lilian?
Gipsy caravans. Adam and Eve.
Oh, Leonard, she thought, what a mess we made of things! She remembered the intent and frightening way in which he had grabbed her, that night. She remembered the look of betrayal and rage that had come into his face. But he couldn’t have foreseen all this; he couldn’t have wanted any of this… If only she could talk to him! It seemed absurd, all at once, that she couldn’t. She had carted his body down the stairs, she had seen him laid out on a mortuary slab, she had watched his coffin being lowered into the ground; but somehow she hadn’t until this moment absorbed the simple, staggering fact that he had once been here and now was gone. His whistling, his boasting, his yodelling yawns, his innuendoes: it was all of it gone. Where on earth was he? She moved forward, lifting the lamp, almost as if she were searching for him and the light would reveal him. But even the stains of his blood were invisible, in the gloom. He might have been spirited away by a wizard: it was as confounding and as pointless as that.