The Paying Guests(35)
‘No, there are chapters and chapters first.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Let me show you.’
Their fingers collided in the pages as Lilian retrieved the novel. She searched for a minute, then handed the book back – and there was the moment that Frances had remembered, nearly a hundred pages in after all, Vronsky moving aside from the door of the train to allow Anna to step down on to the Moscow platform.
She drew out a chair, and sat. She read the scene right through while Lilian shelled the peas; soon, their fingers colliding again as they reached into the bowl, they were shelling the peas together, discussing novels, poems, plays, the authors they did and didn’t admire… The day was warm, and the window was open; from out in the garden, as they chatted, there came the snip of secateurs. And only when the secateurs fell silent and Frances’s mother could be heard in the yard, making her way back to the house, did Frances get to her feet, and retrieve her laundry, and head downstairs.
After that they met more or less daily, partly to compare their thoughts on Anna Karenina – which Frances had begun to re-read – but mainly, simply, for the pleasure of each other’s company. Whenever they could, they shared their housework, or made their chores overlap. One Monday morning they washed blankets together in a zinc tub on the lawn, Frances feeding them through the mangle while Lilian turned the wheel; afterwards, hot, damp, their skirts hauled up over their knees, they sat on the step drinking tea and smoking cigarettes like chars. Two or three times they returned to the park, always making the same small circuit, always finishing up at the band-stand, looking for the names of new lovers in the paint. And one bright afternoon while Frances’s mother was visiting a neighbour they carried cushions out to the garden and lay in the shade of the linden tree eating Turkish delight. Frances had seen the sweets on a market stall and had bought them for Lilian as a gift. ‘To match your Turkish slippers,’ she said, as she handed them over. They were the sham English variety, sickly pink and white cubes; she herself gave up on them after a single bite. But Lilian, delighted, prised out lump after lump, putting each piece whole into her mouth, closing her eyes in ecstasy.
Just occasionally, Frances found herself wondering what the two of them had in common. Now and then, when they were apart, she’d struggle to remember where the essence of their friendship lay. But then they would meet, exchange a smile… and she wouldn’t wonder at all. Lilian might not be amusing or clever in the way that Christina, say, was amusing and clever – But, no, she was amusing, and she was clever; she could sew, for example, like a Bond Street seamstress, thought nothing of picking apart an entire garment and restyling it, nothing of settling down at three o’clock in the afternoon with a needle and a thousand seed-pearls that had to be attached to a blouse in time for a trip to a dancing-hall that night. Frances would sit and watch her do it, and marvel at her poise – admiring again her calmness, her stillness, that capacity she had for filling her own smooth skin. It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.
The bigger mystery, surely, was that marriage of hers. Every so often when her husband stopped in the kitchen for one of his chats Frances would study him, trying to discover some quality in him that might chime with some quality of Lilian’s; more often than not, she failed to do it. She asked again about their courtship, and Lilian replied as she had before: he’d had nice blue eyes, a sense of fun… Beyond that, she became evasive; so Frances learned to leave the subject. She had evasions of her own, after all. How little the two of them knew each other, really. They were practically strangers. She hadn’t had an inkling of Lilian’s existence until six weeks before. Now she’d catch herself thinking of her at all sorts of odd moments, always slightly surprised when she did so, able to follow the thought backward, stage by stage, link by link, this idea having been called to mind by that one, which in turn had been suggested by that… But they all had their finish at Lilian, wherever they started.
But women’s friendships were like that, she reflected: a giddy-up, and off they cantered. If she occasionally lapsed into gallantry – well, there was something about Lilian that inspired gallantry, that was all. And if there were more of those moments, those little licks, almost of romance, they meant nothing; she was sure they meant nothing. Lilian, at least, seemed untroubled by them. She might look doubtful for a second, but she always laughed the doubt away. She might gaze at Frances from time to time with her eyes narrowed and her head cocked, as if she could sense some enigma to her and wanted to get to the bottom of it. Or she would turn the conversation to love and marriage, in a hinting way… And then, it was true, Frances would feel a qualm, a prick of unease, to think of the shallow foundations on which their intimacy was built. And she would resolve in future to be more cautious; but the caution unravelled, every time.
By now it was June, true summer, each day finer than the last. Mr Barber grew jauntier than ever, going off to work on Saturday mornings with his tennis racket under his arm, spending the afternoons at his sports club, coming home to boast to Frances about the points he had won, the spots he’d knocked off the opposition. And in the long, light evenings he took to wandering about the house looking for little jobs to do, things to fix and improve. He oiled hinges, re-cemented loose tiles on the hall floor, replaced the washer in the scullery tap so that it lost its plink. Frances couldn’t decide if she was grateful for the help or felt piqued by it. She had been planning for ages to see to those tiles herself. Now, whenever he crossed the hall, she had to listen to him pause, test the floor with his foot, and give a murmur of satisfaction as he admired his own handiwork.