The Paying Guests(187)
And when she opened her eyes again, Lilian was there.
How long had she been standing there? Not long at all perhaps, because she was breathless, as if she’d been running. Her head was bare, her hair untidy; she had her widow’s hat in her hand, the veil of it fluttering. She said, in a disbelieving way, ‘I saw you from the taxi. I came looking for you, and I found you. Why didn’t you wait for me? Why did you go?’
Frances was staring at her as if she might be a figure in a dream. ‘I thought you wouldn’t want to look at me.’
‘How could you think that?’
‘Because —’ She lowered her head. ‘Because I’m not sure that I can bear to look at myself.’
Lilian stood still for a moment, then came into the alcove and sat down at her side.
After a silence, she spoke wearily. ‘I wish there was something I could say to you, Frances, to make it all right.’ She passed a gloved hand over her face. Her hands were slim as a mannequin’s now, and her cheeks had hollows in them; all her treacly loveliness had faded. She sighed, and let the hand drop. ‘But he will always be dead. He will always, always be dead. And I will always have killed him. And all the time I’ve been at Walworth I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, trying to see what I could have done differently – where I could have stopped it, where I could have kept it from becoming what it became. But every time, it seemed to me that the only thing I could have done differently was never to have kissed you, that night, after the party… And even now, after everything, I can’t wish that. You made me want to, for a while, but – I can’t. I can’t.’
I can’t. They were a queer two words by which to be reunited: a statement of failure, Frances thought, as much as of love. But they were like the two words that the jury had brought back: the moment she heard them she began to shake, to imagine if they had not been said.
Lilian saw, and put a hand over hers; and presently the tremble passed away. They didn’t try to speak again. They leaned together by an inch – that was all it took, after all, to close the space between them. Would it be all right, wondered Frances, if they were to allow themselves to be happy? Wouldn’t it be a sort of insult to all those others who had been harmed? Or oughtn’t they to do all they could – didn’t they almost have a duty – to make one small brave thing happen at last?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t think of it. Her mind wouldn’t reach that far. It wouldn’t reach further than Lilian’s hand and shoulder and hip, warm against hers. They’d have to rise soon, she supposed. A boy was calling the evening edition. At home, her mother would be waiting. Lilian’s family were waiting too. But for now there was this, and it was enough, it was more than they could have hoped for: the two of them in their stone corner, their dark clothes bleeding into the dusk, lights being kindled across the city, and a few pale stars in the sky.
Author’s Note
Many books helped to inform and inspire this one. I am particularly indebted to the following: Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford, 2001), Billie Melman’s Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke, 1988), Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (London, 1933) and Chronicle of Youth: War Diary 1913–1917 (London, 1981), Carol Acton’s Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse (Basingstoke, 2007), Patricia Jalland’s Death in War and Peace: A History of Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970 (Oxford, 2010), Lucy Bland’s Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester, 2013), Winifred Duke’s Trial of Harold Greenwood (Edinburgh and London, 1930), F. Tennyson Jesse’s Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner (London and Edinburgh, 1935) and A Pin to See the Peepshow (London, 1934), David Napley’s Murder at the Villa Madeira: The Rattenbury Case (London, 1988), Filson Young’s Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson (Edinburgh and London, 1923) and René Weis’s Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson (London, 1988). As these titles perhaps reveal, this novel had as its starting-point my interest in some of the high-profile British murder cases of the twenties and thirties. The Paying Guests, however, is a work of fiction.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my wonderful editors in the UK, the US and Canada: Lennie Goodings, Megan Lynch and Lara Hinchberger. Thanks to everyone at Greene & Heaton, and to Jean Naggar, Jennifer Weltz and Dean Cooke. Thanks to the staff at the Southwark Local History Library, the Lambeth Archives, the London Library, the Cinema Museum and the London Jamyang Buddhist Centre (formerly the Lambeth Police Court); to my insightful early readers Susan de Soissons, Antony Topping, Christie Hickman, Ursula Doyle and Kendra Ward; and to the following people for expertise and/or moral support: Laura Doan, James Tayler, Alison Oram, Jackie Malton, Val McDermid, Professor Sue Black, Zo? Gullen, Fiona Leach, Julia Parry and Kate Taylor. Special thanks to Sally O-J, whose enthusiasm for this novel helped keep it afloat in choppy waters. Above all: thank you Lucy, for your wisdom, your patience and your love.