The Paying Guests(40)
She felt Lilian’s uncertainty in the slowing of her hands. She thought Frances might be teasing. With a touch of laughter, she answered, ‘A girl?’
‘Another woman,’ said Frances, flatly. ‘I’d like to be able to say it was terribly pure and innocent, and all that. It – well, it wasn’t.’ There was a silence. ‘You know what I mean?’
Lilian still said nothing; but she withdrew her hands. Frances gave it another few seconds, then turned to look at her. She was standing with the scissors at her side, and her colour was rising, rising even as Frances watched, spreading upward in a single tide of colour from the triangle of flesh that showed at her open-necked blouse, over her throat, her cheek, her forehead. She met Frances’s gaze, then looked away.
‘I – I didn’t know,’ she said.
‘No. Well, how could you?’
‘I’d supposed there was a man.’
‘Yes, that was my fault. I’m sorry. I oughtn’t to have misled you. But this sort of thing – one can’t just drop it into conversation. I don’t feel in the least ashamed about it. My friend and I, we were awfully in love. – But don’t let’s talk about it any more.’ Lilian’s colour had deepened at the word love. Frances turned back to the wall. ‘I’m sorry I mentioned it. Don’t give it another thought. It was a long time ago, and it was – it was nothing, really.’
It was not nothing. It was the crisis of her life. But she felt sick now with the knowledge that she had blundered, said too much. What on earth had she been thinking? She had let herself be seduced by the warmth and the ease of her friendship with Lilian, forgetting how unlikely their friendship actually was. Lilian was married, after all. Christ! Would she tell her husband? Tell her sisters? Tell her chatterbox mother?
Feeling sicker than ever, she risked another look over her shoulder. She saw Lilian wiping at the blades of the scissors, so patently struggling to digest what she had just learned that the information was almost visible, like a sharp crust going down.
But then, without meeting Frances’s gaze, she moved in and began, again, to cut. Frances didn’t mind the snips now. Instead, she was willing the blades forward. She’d become aware in a way she hadn’t been before of the intimacy of their poses, herself a sort of captive on the chair, Lilian leaning into and over her, breathing against her neck and ear. The cutting part of it, thank God, took only another few minutes. But when Lilian had put aside the scissors she returned to the vanity case, to bring out an appalling-looking thing like a goffering-iron. Seeing her take the iron to the stove, realising what it was for, Frances said, ‘You needn’t do the waving as well, you know. There’s no need for it. I really don’t mind.’ But Lilian’s eyelids fluttered. No, she had promised to do the wave. She wanted to do it properly. It wouldn’t take long… She turned the tongs in the blue gas flame, tested them on a scrap of paper, waved them about to cool them slightly – all in silence, unsmiling. Then she returned to her spot behind the chair and, with the very tips of her fingers, she straightened Frances’s head. In a toneless voice, she said, ‘Now, sit quite still.’
The wet hair sizzled alarmingly as the tongs took hold, and the air quickly became sour with a scent like that of burning feathers. The heat of the iron, close to Frances’s scalp, was blistering, insane! Lilian, however, pressed on without a word, making her way along one length of hair and then another, regularly stepping back to survey her handiwork, every so often returning to the stove to re-heat the iron. She never once caught Frances’s eye as she was doing it, and she never lost her flaming colour. Frances sat as sweating and as miserable as if she were in the dentist’s chair.
At last the ordeal came to an end. Lilian spent another minute or two making adjustments with the comb. Then she fetched her husband’s shaving-glass from the shelf above the sink, and put it into Frances’s hands.
‘Well?’ she asked quietly. ‘Do you like it?’
The sight of her own reflection took Frances aback. The hair was heart-stoppingly short, the waves so wonderfully well done that she struggled to recognise herself. She turned and tilted her head. ‘I might be someone else completely.’
‘It makes you look awfully modern and shick.’
‘Shick?’
Somehow, Lilian blushed even harder. ‘Chic. It shows off the nice bones in your face.’
And, after all, perhaps it did, for the blunt bottom edge of the haircut drew attention to the line of her jaw; and Christina had always used to say that Frances’s jaw was her best feature. But she couldn’t enjoy it. She couldn’t relax. Lilian took away the mirror and began to gather together the hair that had collected on the newspaper; it looked revolting heaped there like that, like a bit of stuffing from the inside of an armchair. Frances rose and did her best to help. They made a bulky packet of it, and stuffed the packet into the bin.
But their hands met as they did it, and they twitched away from each other; everything between them was wrong, off kilter. The hilarity of the past hour, the beauty-parlour silliness, the slipping in and out of clothes – it had all evaporated. Or, worse than that, it had all, Frances supposed, become suspect, become charged and tarnished by her confession. Lilian was tidying away the scissors and the combs now, looking almost angry. Frances had never before seen her look anything but open and kind. Was her mind running backward? Was she remembering odd incidents between Frances and herself, the Turkish delight, the chivalry, Frances chasing away her admirer from the band-stand? Was she thinking that Frances had seen him off in order to take his place?