The Paying Guests(20)

She wished now that she hadn’t listened. She crept into bed and blew out her candle, but lay wakeful, open-eyed. She heard the couple moving about between their sitting-room and kitchen, and soon one of them paused on the landing – Mr Barber, yawning again. She watched the shrinking away of the light from under her door as he turned down the gas.





3





Her sense of disquiet passed with the night. When the couple rose in the morning they sounded ordinary, even cheerful. Mr Barber was humming as he shaved at the sink. Before he left for his half-Saturday at the office he said something in a low tone to his wife, and she answered him with laughter.

An hour or so later, Frances left the house herself: she went to the florist’s to fetch the wreath for her father’s grave. And as soon as she and her mother had had their lunch, they set off for the cemetery.

The weather had dulled overnight, and they had dressed for it, and for the occasion, in their soberest coats and hats. But it was May, after all: they grew warm on the journey to West Norwood, and warmer still as they made the long uphill walk to her father’s plot. By the time they arrived at it, Frances was sweating. She took off her gloves, considered removing her hat – had got as far as drawing out its pin before she caught her mother’s disapproving eye.

‘Father wouldn’t mind, would he? He hated being too warm himself, remember?’

‘Father always knew when to keep a hat on, however warm he was.’

Frances thrust the pin back in, turning away. ‘I’ll bet he’s warm just now.’

‘What was that?’

‘I said, “I’ll get some water now.”’

‘Oh.’ Her mother looked wary. ‘Yes, do.’

They unpacked their tools, their cemetery kit: the trowel, the rake, the brush, the bottle, the bar of Monkey Brand. Her mother got to work on the weeds and the moss while Frances went to the tap. She returned to the grave to wet the brush and draw it across the soap, and then to start scrubbing at her father’s headstone.

The stone was plain, solid, handsome – expensive, she thought, on every visit, with resentment; for, of course, the funeral arrangements had all been made in the first bewildering days after her father’s death, before she and her mother had had a chance to discover just how stupendously he had managed to mishandle the family funds. JOHN FRYER WRAY, the inscription read, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER, MUCH MISSED, the letters black against a marble that had once been a gleaming quartz white, but which the sooty drizzles of suburban south London were bent on staining khaki.

Running her brush in soapy circles over the tarnished marble she thought of her brother John Arthur’s grave, just north of Combles: she and her mother had visited it, along with John Arthur’s fiancée, Edith, in 1919. They had made the journey in December – perhaps the worst time to do it, for in the bitter weather the raw, still-shattered landscape had looked like a scene from hell. There had been no shred of comfort to be found in it, only a new sort of agony in thinking of the months that John Arthur had been forced to spend there. Since then, Frances had heard people speak of the consolations of the cemeteries. One of her mother’s friends had described the sense of peace that had descended on her as she’d stood at her son’s grave. She had heard his voice, she’d said, as clearly as she had ever heard it in life: he had told her not to mourn, that mourning was wasteful, mourning would keep the world in darkness when what it needed was to progress into light. At John Arthur’s grave Frances had heard nothing save the wet cough of the elderly farmer who had guided the way to the site. The plot itself had meant little to her. It had simply been beyond belief that all she had known and loved about her brother should have had its finish in that slim depression of earth at her feet. She regretted ever having made the trip. She still visited the place, sometimes, in dreams, and felt the same empty horror; she was always alone on the sticky ground, sinking.

Then again, Noel had no grave at all, and that was hard in a different way. He had been lost in the Mediterranean, in the final year of the War, when the ship on which he’d been travelling out of Egypt had been torpedoed. How exactly had he died? Had he drowned? Could he have been killed in the first blast? There had been confusion at the time, someone claiming to have seen him floating face-down in the water, someone else alleging that he had been hauled on to a raft, wounded but very much alive. But no such raft had ever been found. Might the enemy have picked him up? Certainly his body was never recovered; and so many tales had been told, in those days, of the miraculous reappearances of shell-shocked soldiers that for months after his death, well into the first year of Peace, Frances’s mother had clung on to the hope of his return. There had been several dreadful moments: knocks at the door at odd hours, boys on the street who faintly resembled him… Frances shuddered to remember that time now. Poor, poor Noel. He had been the baby of the family. When she thought of him she saw him not as the nineteen-year-old he had been when he was killed, but as a boy in a striped pyjama suit, his pink feet smooth and rounded as pebbles. She remembered him once on the beach at Eastbourne, crying because a wave had gone over his head; she had jeered at his faint heart. She would give anything to be able to take that jeer back.

Don’t think of it. Chase it away. Wet the brush again, quickly, quickly. Here was a spot that she had missed. Look how nicely the marble scrubbed up! That was better… She had left the headstone now and was inching her way around the coving. A few more trips to the tap, and the job was done. Next time, she and her mother decided as they rose, they would bring a garden sieve and go through the earth properly; but they’d made it neat enough for this visit. Frances put away their tools, wiped her hands and addressed the grave.