The Paying Guests(23)
‘Oh, you’ve seen the garden, then?’
‘Yes, Lil took us over it.’
‘Just quickly,’ said Mrs Barber.
‘You might be right in the country here. Why, you’d never know you had a neighbour! Gives you quite a bank holiday mood. You could bring in trippers and do them teas. Now, a pokey old place like ours – we live behind my husband’s shop, on the Walworth Road, Vera, Min and me – well, that’s just old-fashioned. But a charming place like this…’
She gazed appreciatively around the room – which seemed to have acquired even more flourishes since Frances had glimpsed it last, the hob grate with a bunch of paper poppies standing in it, the sofa covered in what looked like a chenille table-cloth, complete with bobbles on its hem, and the mantelpiece crowded now with postcards and ornaments: ebony elephants, brass monkeys, a china Buddha, a Spanish fan; the tambourine was there too, its ribbons trailing. ‘I was saying to the girls before you come up,’ Mrs Viney went on warmly, ‘isn’t it wonderful to think of all the ladies that must have lived here in days gone by, in their bonnets and fine frocks? Such skirts those frocks had, didn’t they! Yards of material in them! Makes you wonder how they got on, with all the muck on the streets back then. Makes you wonder how they got up the stairs, even. As for visiting certain other little places —’
‘Mum!’ cried her daughters. Mrs Barber cried it loudest of all.
Mrs Viney opened wide her button eyes. ‘What? Oh, Mrs Wray knows it’s only my fun. So does Miss Wray, I’m sure. Besides, we’re all ladies here.’
At that the little girl began to protest that they were not all ladies; that there were boys there too. Mrs Viney, still comfortable, said, ‘Well, you know what I mean.’
But, no, the little girl didn’t know what she meant, because Maurice wasn’t a lady, and Siddy wasn’t a lady. Siddy wasn’t even a boy yet, he was too little —
‘That’s enough from you, madam,’ said Vera sharply, while Frances, puzzled, thought, Siddy? The girl pushed out her grown-up mouth, but fell silent. Mrs Viney was saying again, Yes, she did think the house a fine one. ‘Such a bit of luck for Lil and Len. And hasn’t Lil done the rooms up nice! She always was the artistic one in the family. – No, Lil, you was!’ She gave Frances a wink. ‘I’m making her blush, look.’
‘It’s her artist’s temperament,’ said Vera, in her dry way.
‘Well, I don’t know which side she gets it from. Not from mine, that’s for sure! And as for her dear father, God rest him, why, he couldn’t hang a picture straight on a nail, let alone paint one —’
Her words were broken into by an extraordinary noise, a snuffling, gurgling, animal sound, that made Frances and her mother give starts of alarm. The sisters, by contrast, grew hushed. Vera peered over the arm of the sofa into a large straw bag that was sitting beside it – a bag which Frances, all this time, had taken for a simple hold-all, but which she now realised was a carrying basket for an infant. There was a moment of suspense. The women spoke in whispers. Was he going off? Was he off? Had he gone? But then the snuffling started up again, and almost instantly exploded into a howl.
‘Oh, dear!’
‘Dear, dear!’
‘Never mind!’
‘Here he is!’
Vera had put her hands into the basket and lifted out a kicking baby in a knitted yellow suit. This was Siddy, then: she handed him across the hearth-rug to Netta, who set him on her lap with his limbs still thrashing, his big puce-coloured head rolling about on a stem-like neck.
‘Won’t you smile for the ladies?’ she asked him. ‘No? Not after Mrs Wray, and Miss Wray, have come all the way up to see you? Oh, what a face!’
‘P’raps he’s hungry,’ suggested Mrs Viney, as the child continued to howl.
‘He’s always hungry, this one. He’s like his dad in that department.’
‘How’s his napkin?’
Netta patted his bottom. ‘His napkin’s all right. He just wants to join in. Don’t you? Hey?’
She bounced the baby on her knee, and his head rolled more wildly, though his cries began to subside.
Frances’s mother, who liked babies, leaned forward for a better view. ‘Quite the little emperor, isn’t he?’ she said, with a smile.
‘He’s that, all right,’ said Mrs Viney, showing the gaps in her teeth. ‘He can scream like a lord, anyhow. Oh, just look at him! Like a great big turnip, isn’t he? We’re hoping he’ll grow into his head. And his big brother there was just the opposite. Do you remember, Netta? Oh, his head was that small, you could have darned your stocking on it!’ She had to wipe away tears of laughter. ‘Have you any other children, Mrs Wray? You won’t mind my asking, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ answered Frances’s mother, drawing her gaze from the wobbling infant in Netta’s lap. ‘I had three children altogether. My sons both gave their lives in the War.’
Mrs Viney’s face became stripped of its mirth. She said, ‘Oh, now ain’t that a shame. Oh, I am sorry for you. My brother lost two of his boys the same way – and had another sent home with his eyes shrivelled right up in his head. Vera’s husband, Arthur, we lost too. Didn’t we, Ver? I used to pine after boys, you know, Mrs Wray, when I was a young married woman. I could never hang on to boy babies, I don’t know why. I had two misses and a still, and they were all boys, the midwife told me; the last one such a dear little mite, too.’