The Paying Guests(27)

And the cigarette changed her, somehow. Some of her girlishness fell away. She sat back after the first puff, picking a strand of tobacco from her lip with a casual, practised gesture, and, ‘Len ought to see us now,’ she said. ‘He’s like your mother, Miss Wray, and doesn’t really want me smoking. But then, men never do want women to do the things they want to do themselves, have you noticed?’

She had spoken conventionally. But Frances, looking for something that would serve as an ashtray, finally pulling across a saucer, said, ‘Things like voting, you mean? Standing for Parliament? No, I hadn’t noticed that at all. Let’s see, what else? Managing industries? Working whilst married? Suing for divorce? Stop me if I become boring.’

Mrs Barber laughed. The laughter was mixed with the smoke from her cigarette: it seemed to come visibly out of her pursed, plump mouth, and was so warm, so real, so unlike her usual automatic tittering, that Frances felt an odd thrill of triumph at having called it into life.

Once it had faded, however, they sat without speaking, in a silence broken only by soft kitchen noises, the tick of the clock, the stir of coals in the stove, the faintly musical drip of water in the scullery sink. They caught one another’s eye. Frances said, ‘I liked meeting your family today.’

Mrs Barber regarded her warily. ‘It’s nice of you to say so.’

‘I’m not saying it to be nice. I don’t say things I don’t mean.’

‘I was worried about you meeting them. You, and your mother.’

‘You were? Why?’

‘Well… Len said you’d think them common.’

Frances, remembering watching the visitors go from the drawing-room window, felt a smudge of guilt. She felt a smudge of something else, something darker, towards Mr Barber. Tapping ash into the saucer, she said firmly, ‘I’m very glad they came. I specially liked your mother. – Now, why do you look like that?’

Mrs Barber had sagged slightly. ‘Only that, well, people do like her. And the fact is, she plays up to it. She must always be a character, my mother. Some of the things she said this afternoon! I don’t know what Mrs Wray must have thought. And then, she will go about in those cheap old things of hers, when she has plenty of money, now, to buy better.’ She tapped ash from her own cigarette, looking guilty. ‘I oughtn’t to be so unkind, ought I? She’s had such a bad time of it, one way and another. We were – We were terribly poor, you know, when I was young, after my father died and before my mother married Mr Viney. I’m ashamed to tell you how poor. My mother worked too hard. That’s why her back’s so bad. And you saw her legs?’

Frances grimaced. ‘Can nothing be done?’

‘Oh, she won’t do what the doctor tells her. And then, Mr Viney will never let her rest. She must be up and down doing things for him every hour of the day and night. He looks at a woman sitting idle and sees a knife going to rust, I think.’ She turned her head. The clock was chiming. ‘Is that five, already? Len’ll be back any minute. He’s been over at his parents’. I ought to go and tidy up. His mother keeps their house like a pin.’

She spoke with a slight yawn, however, and remained in her chair, plainly enjoying her cigarette, evidently glad to be talking so freely. She had quite let slip the air she’d sometimes had with Frances in the past, of being on her best behaviour. She put an elbow on the table and leaned with her chin on her hand, the flesh of her arm looking rounded, solid, smooth. There were no angles to her at all, thought Frances with envy. She was all warm colour and curve. How well she filled her own skin! She might have been poured generously into it, like treacle.

Now she was smiling, savouring the silence. ‘Isn’t it lovely and quiet here? I never knew a house be so quiet; at least, I never knew a quiet like this one. It’s like velvet. When it was quiet at Cheveney Avenue – Len’s parents’ – it used to make me want to scream. They’re not at all alike, you see, his side and mine.’

‘No?’

‘No! My sisters and I were all brought up Catholic like our father. Not that we ever go to mass any more or anything like that. But, well, that sort of thing sticks. Len’s parents think me a heathen. They’re chapel people. And his cousin was in the Black and Tans. – Len’s not like that,’ she added hurriedly, seeing Frances’s expression. ‘But his parents and his brothers – Oh, they’ve no sense of art, or life, or anything. If you so much as open a book in front of them you get called grand. Here, you can be calm, and the house seems to like it. And nobody needs to know what you’re doing! Not like the houses I grew up in. You knew it if the neighbours stirred their tea in some of those. Oh, we lived in some awful places, Miss Wray. We lived in a house that was haunted, once.’

Frances supposed she was joking. ‘Haunted? By whom, or what?’

‘By an old, old man with a long white beard. He wasn’t misty like a ghost in a book; he was solid, like a real person. I saw him twice, coming down the stairs. Vera and I both saw him.’

She wasn’t joking at all. Frances frowned. ‘Weren’t you frightened?’

‘Yes, but he never hurt anybody. We found out about him from the neighbours. He had lived in the house years before, and his wife had died, and he’d wasted away through missing her. They said he went up and down the stairs looking for her, night after night. Sometimes I wonder if he’s still there. It’s sad to think he might be, isn’t it, when all he wanted was to be with her.’