The Paying Guests(22)
‘Well, for goodness sake, bring the ladies in! Don’t leave the poor things standing out there on the landing, in their own house.’
The woman shrugged, and half smiled – as if to say to Frances, not unkindly, Now you’re for it. She moved back into the sitting-room, opening the door wider so that the Wrays might follow. Frances glanced at her mother; she was madly re-pinning her hat. The two of them climbed the last few stairs and crossed the landing.
Entering a fug of scent and cigarette smoke they found – not a crowd, after all, but three women, sitting in chairs drawn together around the unlighted hearth. Frances noticed the chairs first, in fact, because one of them, a black oak armchair, looking surprisingly at home among the Barbers’ rococo trimmings, was not actually the Barbers’ at all; it was one of her father’s Jacobean monstrosities and had been brought up from the kitchen passage downstairs. Seated on it now was a short, stout woman of fifty or so, with brown button eyes, dreadfully swollen ankles, and hair so artificially frizzed and hennaed it resembled the lustreless wig of a waxwork. It was she, obviously, who had called out to the landing, for as Frances and her mother made their awkward entrance she said, in the same game Cockney tones, ‘Oh, Mrs Wray, Miss Wray, how very nice to meet you! How nice indeed! And Lil said we shouldn’t see you – that you’d be out all afternoon. Oh, what luck! I’m Mrs Viney. I hope you’ll excuse my not rising to shake your hands. You may see the state of things with me.’ She indicated her appalling ankles. ‘Once I’m down, I have to stay down. Min’ – she leaned to tap at the arm of a sandy-faced girl on the sofa – ‘give Mrs Wray your place, my darling. You can make do with the puff, a slip like you. – This is Min, my youngest,’ she told Frances, as if that explained everything. ‘Miss Lynch, I suppose I ought to call her, in a well-to-do house like this! And here’s Mrs Rawlins and Mrs Grice. My Lord, don’t that make me feel old! Mrs Grice you’ve just met, of course.’
Frances could do nothing but move forward across a floor littered with bags and scarves and elaborate hats to shake hands with each of the visitors in turn. Her mother, protesting feebly that they oughtn’t to trouble, that she wouldn’t stay, was somehow steered to the vacant place on the sofa, beside the sharp-faced Mrs Grice – Vera. The girl called Min sat down on a red leather pouffe. Frances took the remaining empty chair, beside the woman who had been introduced as Mrs Rawlins.
Mrs Rawlins was sitting in a pink plush easy chair of the Barbers’; she occupied it with an air of entitlement, like a slightly smug Madonna. The little boy had his face in her lap, his long-lashed eyes still wet with tears, but the tears themselves apparently forgotten; he seemed to be idly biting her thigh. He gazed up at Frances as he did it, and she repeated her anxiety about his having put his head between the banisters and possibly hurt his ear. Mrs Rawlins smiled – smiled in that pitying, knowing way in which married women often smiled, Frances had found, at the fears of spinsters, saying, Oh, they had ears of India-rubber at that age. And, to prove it, she reached for one of the boy’s already scarlet ears and drew the top and bottom tips of it together, then let them spring back against his scalp. The visitors laughed – the little girl laughing loudest, on a forced, hard, jarring note. The boy clapped his hands to his head, looking torn between triumph at having made a comedian of himself and mortification at the way he had done it. Mrs Viney, still tittering, said, ‘Poor Maurice. We oughtn’t to laugh. But there, if little boys will go putting their heads through other people’s banisters, they must expect to be laughed at.’ Her tone grew indulgent as she spoke, and she held out her hands to him. ‘Oh, come here to Nanny!’
Come here to Nanny… While she fussed with the boy, the younger women looking on, Frances began to catch the resemblances between them all. Mrs Rawlins – Netta, the others called her – was, she realised, simply a more matronly Min. Vera had Mrs Viney’s button eyes, though with a drier expression in them. Even the boy and girl, she saw now, had the family look, the girl solid on sturdy legs, the boy fair but with the sort of fairness that would quickly darken, and each of them with a pink, full, elastic, unchildlike mouth – Mrs Barber’s mouth, in fact. She had just, with relief and surprise, worked the mystery out, when Mrs Barber herself came breathlessly into the room.
She caught Frances’s eye first. ‘Miss Wray, I’m so sorry! Mrs Wray, how are you?’ Her smile pulled tight, and her tone wavered. ‘You’ve met my mother and my sisters, then?’
‘Oh, we’re great pals already,’ said Mrs Viney comfortably. ‘And there you were, Lil, saying as how the ladies would be out all day!’
‘She was hoping you wouldn’t meet us,’ Vera told Frances. ‘She’s ashamed of us.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mrs Barber, blushing.
But, ‘Yes, that’s the truth of it!’ their mother cried gaily, her old-fashioned stays giving off a volley of pops and creaks. ‘Still, we make up in cheerfulness, Mrs Wray, what we lack in nice manners. And, oh, I do think this house delightful, really I do.’
Frances’s mother, flushing, blinking, rapidly adjusting to the situation, said, ‘Thank you. Yes, it’s been a happy family home in its day. A little large, that’s all, for my daughter and me to manage now.’
‘Oh, no, you don’t want all that trouble. No, there’s nothing like a big house for trouble. There’s nothing brings your spirits down, I always think, like an empty room. You shall enjoy having company here now, I expect. And don’t you keep the back garden lovely!’