The Paying Guests(30)

Had Mrs Barber taken trouble? It was difficult to say, for she took pains over her outfit every day of the week. Frances, joining her on the landing, found her in her usual combination of warm colours and comfortable lines, a violet frock, pink stockings, grey suede shoes, lace gloves, a hat of the snug modern variety that didn’t require a pin at all: she wore it pulled down nearly to her dark eyelashes. But around her wrist was the tasselled silk cord of something – Frances thought it a bag, until they moved down the stairs together; then she saw that it was a red paper parasol. And that made her think that Mrs Barber had taken trouble after all, for though the weather was sunny it wasn’t so sunny as all that; the parasol was simply a flourish, to lend a gaiety to the occasion. They might have been heading for the sea-front. Suddenly, she wished they were. Hastings, Brighton – why hadn’t she thought of it? She ought to have been more ambitious. Once they had left the house it took only a few minutes to reach the gates of the park. They might as well have stayed in the back garden! The sounds of trams and motor-cars barely faded once they were inside.

Still, it was nice to be among the trees, on a path of hard earth, rather than on the dusty pavement. And a stretch of long grass had bluebells in it: Mrs Barber paused to look at them, stooping, taking off a glove, running a hand across the drowsy-looking stems.

The bluebells led them to an odd sort of ruin: a pillared portico, standing alone, wound about with ivy. The park had been put together from the grounds of several large houses when Frances was a child, and she could remember very clearly the house at this end, sitting in a wilderness of bramble, grand and derelict as a mad old duchess. She had once, for a dare, led Noel into its garden, and had been punished for it later – spanked on the back of her legs with a slipper – when he had had nightmares. Now the house, like Noel himself, was gone; there were only a few stranded details to recall it and its neighbours; she thought it sad, sometimes. The park seemed selfconscious, pretending. On wintry days, in particular, the place could be depressing.

But she said some of this to Mrs Barber as they strolled, and perhaps saying it broke the spell of it – or perhaps the weather made the difference; perhaps it was something about being here with Mrs Barber herself, the parasol glowing at her shoulder – anyhow, whatever the cause, the park had a charm today that she couldn’t recall it ever having had before. Its very neatness seemed appealing, everything in such perfect trim, the lawns clipped, the beds of gaudy flowers like icing piped on a cake. It was a little after four, and the passers-by were a daytime crowd of idlers, invalids, children just out of school, women with toddling infants, elderly gents with dogs on leashes – the sort of people, she thought wryly, who’d be the first to get admitted to a lifeboat. How Christina and Stevie would smile at all this! Christina and Stevie, however, seemed far away. She and Mrs Barber took paths scattered with fallen blossom. They walked the length of a terrace made dappled by hanging wisteria. When they looked for a spot on which to settle, she wished they had brought a blanket to spread out on the grass.

Instead, they found a bench, and unpacked their bags. And at once, it became apparent that they had had rather different ideas about what should constitute the picnic. Mrs Barber had made finger-rolls, pin-wheel sandwiches, miniature jam tarts: the sort of fiddly dainties written about in the women’s magazines that Frances now and then read over shoulders on the bus. She herself had brought hard-boiled eggs, radishes from the garden, salt in a twist of paper, half a round of seed cake and a bottle of sugarless tea, swaddled in a dish-cloth to keep it hot. But once they had set out the food on a chequered cloth, the meal looked surprisingly complete. ‘A perfect feast,’ they agreed, as they touched their cups together.

The jam tarts rather fell to pieces when one picked them up, and the pin-wheel sandwiches uncurled, letting out their cheesy innards. It didn’t matter. The rolls were good, the radishes were crisp, the eggs gave up their shells as if shrugging off cumbersome coats; the parasol, propped up, lent everything its winey colour. And Mrs Barber made the bench appear as comfortable as a sofa, letting herself settle sideways, resting a cheek on her fist. Once she laughed her natural laugh again, leaning forward with her wrist at her mouth; a man seated alone on a nearby bench turned his head at the sound. Frances had feared that the day might be awkward. The two of them, after all, barely knew each other. But they seemed to pick up the thread of their intimacy exactly where they had left it in the shadowy kitchen on Saturday afternoon, like retrieving a dropped stitch across a few rows of knitting.

That man, however, kept looking. She met his gaze in a frosty way; that only made him smirk. When the food was finished, she gathered the egg-shells, shook the crumbs from the cloth. ‘Shall we stroll again? See the rest of the sights?’

Mrs Barber smiled. ‘I’d like to.’

There was little enough to look at, really. The small formal garden had some pretty snapdragons in it. On the pond there were ducklings, and comical dirty-yellow goslings. At the tennis courts, two young women were in the middle of a match, playing well, their pleated skirts flying as they raced after the ball. Did Mrs Barber play tennis? No! She was far too lazy. Len played at the sports club at the Pearl; he’d won cups. How about Miss Wray?

‘Oh,’ said Frances, ‘I played at school. That, and lacrosse – a beastly game. I was never much good at those team things. I did better on a bicycle. Or roller-skates. We had a skating rink right here in Camberwell for a while.’