The Paying Guests(28)
Frances’s cigarette had gone out. She relit it and didn’t answer. She was marvelling at Mrs Barber’s candour, her simplicity, her lack of self-consciousness – whatever quality it was, anyhow, that allowed her to say such a thing aloud, with such obvious sincerity. She knew that she herself would find it as hard to confess to an almost-stranger that she had seen a ghost as to admit to believing in elves and fairies.
Which was why, of course, she realised, she never would see a ghost.
She felt slightly dashed, suddenly. The feeling took her by surprise. She fiddled with the box of matches, setting it on one end and then on another. And when she raised her eyes she found that Mrs Barber was watching her, her brows drawn together in an expression of concern.
‘I’m afraid I’ve said something to upset you, Miss Wray.’
Frances shook her head, smiled. ‘No.’
‘I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have been talking about ghosts and unhappy things on a day like today.’
‘A day like today?’ said Frances. Then: ‘You mean, because of my father? Oh, no. No, you mustn’t think that. Think it about my brothers, if you like. I miss them every day of my life. But as for my father —’ She tossed the matches down. ‘My father, Mrs Barber, was a nuisance when he was alive, he made a nuisance of himself by dying, and he’s managed to go on being a nuisance ever since.’
Mrs Barber said, ‘Oh. I – I’m sorry.’
They were plunged back into silence. Frances thought of her reticent mother, just across the hall. But again the stillness was tempered by those gentle kitchen sounds, the tumble of coals, the scullery music. And Mrs Barber had spoken freely… She found she had an urge to meet the candour, repay it with something of her own. She took a long draw on her cigarette, and went on in a lower tone.
‘It’s simply that my father and I – we never got along. He had old-fashioned ideas about women, about daughters. I was a great trial to him, as perhaps you can imagine. We argued about everything, with my poor mother as referee. Most of all we argued about the War, which he saw as some sort of Great Adventure, while I – Oh, I loathed it, right from the start. My elder brother, John Arthur, the gentlest creature in the world, he more or less bullied into enlisting; I shall never forgive him for that. Noel, my other brother, went in practically as a schoolboy, and when he was killed my father’s response was to have a series of “heart attacks” – to take to an armchair, in other words, while my mother and I ran about after him like a pair of fools. He died a few months before the Armistice, not of a heart attack after all, but of an apoplexy, brought on by reading something he disagreed with in The Times. After his death —’ Her tone became rueful. ‘Well, it must be obvious to you and your husband, Mrs Barber, that my mother and I aren’t as well off as we might be. It turned out that my father had been putting the family money into one bad speculation after another; he’d left a pile of debts behind him that we’re still paying off and – Oh.’ She stubbed out her cigarette, unable to be still. ‘Look, you mustn’t let me talk about him! It isn’t fair of me. He wasn’t a bad man. He was a blusterer and a coward; but we’re all cowardly sometimes. I’ve got into the habit of hating him, but it’s a horrible habit, I know. The truth is, the most hateful thing my father ever did to me was to die. I – I’d had plans, you see, while he was alive. I’d had terrific plans —’
She paused, or faltered; then drew herself up. ‘Well, my father always did say that my plans would come to nothing. He’d certainly smile if he could see me now, still here, on Champion Hill. Like your ghost!’
She smiled, herself. But Mrs Barber did not smile back. Her gaze was serious, dark, kind. ‘What sort of plans did you have, Miss Wray?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. To change the world! To put things right! To – I’ve forgotten.’
‘Have you?’
‘It was a different time, then. A serious time. A passionate time. But an innocent time, it seems to me now. One believed in… transformation. One looked ahead to the end of the War and felt that nothing could ever be the same. Nothing is the same, is it? But in such disappointing ways. And then, the fact is, I had had – There had been someone – a sort of proposal —’
But now she caught sight of those rings on Mrs Barber’s finger: the wedding-band, the little diamonds. She said, ‘Forgive me, Mrs Barber. I don’t mean to be mysterious. I don’t mean to be maudlin, either. All I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that this life, the life I have now, it isn’t —’ It isn’t the life I was meant to have. It isn’t the life I want! ‘It isn’t the life I thought I would have,’ she finished.
She seemed to herself to have been very nearly raving. She felt as exposed and as foolish as if she had inadvertently given a glimpse of her bare backside. But Mrs Barber nodded, then dropped her gaze in her delicate way – as if, impossibly, she understood it all. And when she spoke at last, what she said was, ‘It must be funny for you and your mother, having Len and me here.’
‘Oh, now,’ said Frances, ‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘No, I know you didn’t. But it must be funny all the same. I like this house so much. I wanted to live in it the minute I saw it. But it must be awfully strange for you to see me and Len here; as if we’d gone helping ourselves to your clothes, and were wearing them all the wrong way.’