The Paying Guests(21)
‘Well, Father, there you are, all spruce and tidy for your birthday. It’s more than you deserve, I’m sure.’
‘Frances,’ her mother scolded.
‘What? I’d say the same thing to his face if he were here right now. That, and a good many other things. I suppose he’d manage not to hear them. It was about the only thing he could manage.’
‘Hush.’
They stood a little longer, her mother dipping her head and closing her eyes in silent prayer, while Frances surreptitiously drew her wool collar away from her hot neck. They made the walk back to the gates through the older part of the cemetery, the part she by far preferred, with its vulgar last-century monuments, its weeping angels, its extinguished torches, its stone ships in full sail. She read aloud the Dickensian surnames. ‘Bode… Epps… Tooley… Weatherwax! Queer how the names belong to the period. Can surnames change, like fashions?’
‘Perhaps nobody cared to marry poor Mr Weatherwax.’
‘That’s what you think. “Sorely missed by his five surviving sons”! There ought to be Weatherwaxes all over the place at that rate.’
Out on the street, they gazed doubtfully upward. Frances’s father had always admired the flower gardens in Dulwich Park, and they had planned to take a bus there, have their tea in the café, make a subdued Saturday afternoon of it. But the sky was darker and lower than ever – ‘Thundery,’ said Mrs Wray, who since the War was bothered by storms. They decided to give the day up and go straight home. They took a bus directly to Champion Hill, and had just stepped from its platform when the first great drops of rain came plashing down. They ran the last few yards to the house – Frances going quickest, to have the door open and ready. They tumbled into the hall, gasping and laughing and pulling off their wet things.
Almost as soon as the door was closed behind them they became aware of a stir of voices and movement in the rooms upstairs. There were thumps, and bursts of laughter, followed by quick, light footsteps. Mrs Wray, taking off her hat, raised apprehensive eyes: ‘Good gracious!’
Frances’s heart sank. ‘The Barbers,’ she murmured, ‘must be entertaining.’
As she spoke, the footsteps crossed to the stairs, and the banisters of the upper flight were grasped and set creaking by small, sticky-looking hands. And then a couple of children appeared at the turn, a girl of seven or eight and a younger boy. The boy came first, frowning, determined, but troubled by the trickiness of the descent. Catching sight of Frances and her mother he gave a wobble, mid-step; then, blind with terror, he turned and groped his way past the girl’s legs to scramble back upward. The girl stayed where she was, holding Frances’s gaze, sucking in her lower lip and laughing.
‘He’s a baby,’ she said.
Frances’s mother, her hat in her hand, had moved forward to peer anxiously after him.
‘He’s certainly too much of a baby to be allowed on these stairs. If he should fall – Go back, child!’
The boy, safe now on the landing, and attracted by the tremor of alarm in her voice, had put his head through the spindles of the section of banister directly above her. She grew pale. ‘Get away!’ She made shooing motions at him. ‘Go back, little boy! Oh, if the banisters should break! Frances —’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Frances, going ahead of her, beginning to climb.
At her approach the girl sped off with a giggle, and the boy hastily withdrew his head. He must have caught his ear against one of the spindles as he did it, because after he’d gone scampering away in terror again – into the Barbers’ sitting-room this time, with the girl charging behind him – Frances heard him begin to wail. The wail was answered by a woman’s voice, brisk and satisfied: ‘Well, now what have you done!’ At the same moment another woman put her face around the sitting-room door. Neither the voice nor the face belonged to Mrs Barber. This woman was older, perhaps Frances’s age. Her waved hair was glossy with oil, her mouth liberally lipsticked, her features rather sharp. She saw Frances and her mother advancing warily up the stairs and said, ‘Oh.’ She emerged further. ‘Did you want Lil? She’s out the back.’
Frances, coming to a halt a stair or two from the top, explained about having been anxious for the children. She was afraid that she and her mother had frightened the little boy. She thought he might have hurt his ear on the banister?
Aside from the moans of the injured child, the Barbers’ sitting-room, it seemed to her, had grown unnaturally still. She had the disturbing sense of its being packed with eavesdropping strangers. Unable to see anything past its partly open door, she said, ‘Is Mr Barber here, perhaps?’
The woman snorted. ‘Lenny? Not him! He’s keeping out of our way. Lil won’t be a minute, though, if it’s her you’re after.’
‘No, it isn’t that,’ repeated Frances. ‘We just wanted to be sure about the little boy.’ She added, a touch crisply, ‘I’m Miss Wray. This is Mrs Wray, my mother. We’re the owners of the house.’
At that, from the silent sitting-room, there burst yet another woman’s voice – a jolly, throaty, hop-picker’s one. ‘Is that Mrs Wray? Is that Mrs Wray, Vera?’
The sharp-faced woman tilted her head, and with her gaze moving coolly between Frances and her mother she called back into the room: ‘Yes, and Miss Wray too!’