The Paying Guests(36)

But perhaps his energy was infectious. One morning in the middle of the month she went looking for a fly-swatter, and when she opened a cupboard in the passage a pile of things tumbled out. The things were her brothers’; the house was full of them; she had got used to digging her way through layers of school caps and cricket balls and Henty novels and fossil collections whenever she searched for something in a drawer or a chest. But would she have to dig for ever? Her brothers were never coming back. She collected everything she could find, then summoned her mother. For an hour they sifted and sorted, her mother resisting at every step. The books could go to a charity, surely? Oh, but Noel had had this one as a prize; his name was inside it; it wasn’t quite nice to think of another little boy looking at that. Well, all right. But, these boots? Couldn’t they go? Yes, the boots could go. And the boxing-gloves, the telescope, the microscope and slides?

‘Must we do it now, Frances?’

‘We’ll have to do it some time.’

‘Mightn’t we put them in a trunk, in a cellar?’

‘The cellar’s full of Father’s things. Look, how about this stamp album? Maybe I’ll take it to be valued. Some of these might bring in some money —’

‘Frances, please.’

After all, it had been a bad idea. They seemed to finish up with more than they had started with. They put together one small bundle to be passed on to the vicar’s wife, and Frances’s mother, her cheeks sagging, carried off a few items for herself: school badges, a college scarf. Frances had found a model boat that Noel had built as a boy; he had named it after her. It made the tears stand in her eyes.

Afterwards they were both rather quiet. They ate their lunch, then settled down at the open French windows. Frances’s mother put an upturned tray in her lap with paper, pens and ink on it: she had promised to write some letters, she said, for one of her charities. Frances darned stockings to the regular scratch and tap of her nib, but after fifteen minutes or so she became aware that the sound had ceased; her mother had fallen into a doze. Hastily putting down her mending and darting out of her chair, she was just able to catch the pen before it rolled out of her mother’s fingers. She screwed the cap back on the ink bottle, put it safely to one side. And as she stood gazing down at her mother’s slack, pale, undefended face, tears pricked at her eyes again.

Oh, but it was pointless to be gloomy. She shook the tears away. What could she do with her afternoon? The darning was all very well, but she ought really to take advantage of her mother’s doze and do something grimy. The porch needed a sweep; that would be a good job done. It always made her mother twitchy to know she was out there with a broom, where any of the neighbours might stroll past and see her.

But now there were sounds overhead: Lilian was up in her bedroom. Was she dressing to go out? No, the creaks didn’t suggest it. She was standing still, the boards wheezing with the shifting of her weight. What was she doing?

It wouldn’t hurt, would it, to slip upstairs and find out?

The bedroom door was wide open. Lilian called to her from beyond it the moment her step left the stair. ‘Is that you, Frances?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing? Come in and see me.’

Frances went in warily. It was still a shock to see her brothers’ room as it was now, cluttered with Lilian’s knick-knacks, hung with lace and swags of colour. The top of the chest of drawers was so crammed with scent bottles and powder-puffs and cold-creams that it looked like something from backstage at the Alhambra; over the swing-mirror a pair of newly washed pink silk stockings had been hung to dry. Lilian was standing beside the bed, gazing down at a lot of fashion papers that she had spread on the counterpane. She was making sketches, she said – trying out ideas. Her sister Netta was having a party in a couple of weeks’ time, and she planned to make herself a new frock for it.

Frances looked the sketches over. They were good, she saw with surprise; at least as good, it seemed to her, as Stevie’s Bloomsbury designs. She said, ‘Why, you’re talented, Lilian. You’re an artist, in fact. Your mother said you were; I remember now. She was quite right.’

Lilian answered modestly. ‘Oh, my family call you an artist if you put the clock on the left-hand side of the chimney-piece instead of in the middle.’ But she added, after a second, in a shyer sort of way, ‘I did want to be an artist, though, once upon a time. I used to go to picture galleries and places like that. I thought of taking classes at an art school.’

‘You ought to have done. Why didn’t you?’

‘Oh —’ She laughed. ‘Well, I got married instead.’

She picked up the drawings and held them at arm’s length, looking at them critically. Frances, watching her, said, ‘You might go to an art school now.’

She brightened. ‘I might, mightn’t I?’ But she spoke without much conviction. ‘I don’t expect I’m good enough. And I know what Len would say! He’d call it a waste of time, and a waste of his money. He’s got money on the brain these days. He’s not coming to Netta’s party; he’s going to some stupid assurance men’s thing. He and Charlie are both going to it. A boys’ night out.’

It was an anti-Len day, clearly. But she seemed to want to leave the subject. She studied the drawings for another moment, then made them into a bundle along with the papers on the bed. She took the bundle over to the chest of drawers and did her best to find a spot for it among the scent bottles.