The Paying Guests(32)

She had found a spot on the rail where the paint was chipped, exposing several older colours, right down to the pale raw wood beneath. Running her fingers over the flaw, she said, ‘You don’t think about all these colours when everything’s going all right; you’d go mad if you did. You just think about the colour on the top. But those colours are there, all the same. All the quarrels, and the bits of unkindness. And every so often something happens to put a chip right through; and then you can’t not think of them.’ She looked up, and grew selfconscious; her tone became ordinary again. ‘No, don’t ever get married, Miss Wray. Ask any wife! It isn’t worth it. You don’t know how lucky you are, being single, able to come and go just as you please —’

She stopped. ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon. Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that, about luck. Oh, that was stupid of me.’

Frances said, ‘But what do you mean?’

‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Thinking about what?’

‘Well —’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I had the impression – Maybe I misunderstood. But didn’t you say, on Saturday, when we were sitting in the kitchen, that you had once been engaged to be married, and —?’

Had Frances said that? No, of course she hadn’t. But she had said something, she recalled now – something careless and unguarded. Something about a proposal – was it? A disappointment? A loss?

The parasol was still raised, making that screen behind their shoulders. It was a moment for confidences, for putting things straight. But how, she thought, to explain? How to answer Mrs Barber’s kind, romantic speculations, that were in one way so wildly wide of the mark and in another so horribly near? So she didn’t answer at all – and, of course, her silence answered for her. It isn’t a lie, she said to herself. But she knew that it was a lie, really.

The moment put a slight distance between them. They sat without speaking, side by side, their hips and shoulders close and warm, but she felt that the pleasure of the afternoon had been punctured, was beginning to leak away.

And now, yes, as if summoned up to chase off the last of their intimacy, here came someone – a man, on his own – strolling up into the band-stand, tipping his straw hat to them, then lingering stubbornly a few yards off, pretending to be admiring the view. Frances kept her face turned away from him. Mrs Barber was sitting with her own head bowed. But every so often he looked their way – Frances could see him in the corner of her vision – his eye was roving over towards them with what he must have imagined to be a ‘twinkle’.

She began to feel the twinkle like the buzzing of a fly. After a minute of it she said quietly, ‘Shall we find somewhere else to sit?’

Mrs Barber spoke without raising her head. ‘Because of him? Oh, I don’t mind.’

Their murmurs made the man draw closer. He began studying them like an artist, like a master of composition. ‘Now, if only I had a camera!’ he said, stooping at the side of an imaginary tripod, squeezing a bulb. He laughed at Frances’s expression. ‘Don’t you want your picture taken? I thought all young ladies wanted that. Especially the handsome ones.’

‘Shall we go?’ she asked Mrs Barber again, in an ordinary tone this time.

The man protested. ‘What’s the hurry?’

Frances got to her feet. He saw that she meant it, and came closer, and spoke in a more insinuating way. ‘Did you enjoy your picnic?’

That made her look at him. ‘What?’

‘I should just about say you did. I should say the picnic enjoyed it, too.’ His eyes flicked to Mrs Barber, and he smirked. ‘I never thought it possible for a fellow to envy a boiled egg, until I saw your friend eating hers.’

He was the man who had been watching them earlier on. He must have seen them finish their tea and been following them ever since, from the bench to the flower-beds, from the flower-beds to the pond, from the pond to the tennis courts, from the tennis courts to here. Of course, the red parasol made them rather hard to miss. That wasn’t why Mrs Barber had brought it, surely? That wasn’t why she’d wanted to sit here, in this oddly public spot?

No, of course it wasn’t. She was doing her best to ignore the man, her head dipped, her face flaming. He ducked his own head, in an attempt to catch her eye. ‘Don’t want to play?’

‘Look, go away, will you?’ said Frances.

He looked at her with a gaze grown fishy, then spoke to Mrs Barber again, turning down the corners of his mouth. ‘Your chum doesn’t seem to like me much, I can’t think why. How about you?’

Frances said, ‘No, she doesn’t like you either. Do go away.’

He held his ground for another few moments. But it was Mrs Barber he was after, and she wouldn’t raise her eyes to his; at last there was nothing he could do but give up on them both. He drew in his shoulders, pretending to shudder against a chill, and, ‘Brrr!’ he said, still addressing Mrs Barber, but jerking his head in Frances’s direction. ‘Suffragette, is she?’

No one answered him. He retreated, got out a cigarette, produced a lighter, struck a flame – all in a leisurely sort of way, as if it were the only thing he’d climbed the steps for. But the twinkle had faded from his manner, and after a moment he drifted back to his previous spot at the balustrade. A moment after that, he left the band-stand.