The Paying Guests(42)
There were also, Frances couldn’t help but notice, no more anti-Len days. Quite the opposite. One night the couple went out with Mr Wismuth and his fiancée and came tiptoeing up the stairs at half-past midnight, bringing with them a sense of crowded places, lifted voices, music, drinks, laughter – or so, anyhow, it seemed to her, listening to them in the dark. Another night they blared out gramophone tunes; later, going up to bed, she found their sitting-room door open and got a glimpse of them squashed together in their pink plush easy chair. Mr Barber had hold of what appeared to be a doll or a puppet and was making it prance about in his lap; Lilian, enchanted, had worked her stockingless foot under the cuff of one of his trouser legs and seemed to be idly toeing the diamond pattern on his sock. And the sight of those questing toes had an extraordinary effect on Frances. They made her feel lonelier, suddenly, than she had ever felt before. She went creeping into her room and undressed without lighting a candle, then lay curled in bed in a ferment of misery. What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile…
Next morning, out in the WC, she discovered that her ‘friend’ had arrived. Why it was called a friend she could never imagine – it was more like an enemy within the gates – but, anyhow, seeing the smear of scarlet on the square of Bromo made her, perversely, feel better. One was always a bit demented, she thought, round about the time that one fell poorly. One couldn’t be held accountable for one’s mood then. She told her mother that she had a spot of neuralgia, and spent the rest of the day in bed with a hot water bottle.
Lying propped up on her pillows, her short hair pleasant against her neck, she was aware of the Barbers coming and going beyond her door. Now and then she heard Lilian’s voice: detached from Lilian’s physical presence, the elocution-class tones seemed very pronounced, and her laughter, when it came, had something grating about it. Once again, Frances struggled to understand what had ever drawn the two of them together. Had it simply been boredom, a question of empty days? She thought of the way they had spent their time. Trips to the park, Turkish delight: it all seemed so narrow, so footling. Gazing across at her wardrobe, she remembered how Lilian had gone through her frocks. This is what you ought to wear. Not these terrible cotton stockings! Hadn’t that been rather smug of her? Hadn’t there been a hint of condescension in her attitude to Frances? – as if Frances’s life needed gingering up, and she was the person to ginger it?
She didn’t like it, after all, when she discovered that Frances’s life had already been gingered rather too liberally by someone else.
Well, so much the worse for her! Frances wouldn’t apologise for it. Better to be me, she thought, than married. Better a spinster than a Peckham-minded wife! She rose from her bed full of new resolutions. ‘We must get out and about more,’ she told her startled mother. ‘We must try different things. We are getting groovy.’ She drew up a list of events and activities: concerts, day trips, public meetings. She went in a fit through her address book, writing letters to old friends. She borrowed novels from the library by authors who had never interested her before. She began to teach herself Esperanto, reciting phrases as she polished and swept.
La fajro brulas malbone. The fire burns badly.
?u vi min komprenas? Do you understand me?
Nenie oni povis trovi mian hundon. Nowhere could they find my dog.
‘You’re looking awfully well, Frances,’ her mother’s friend Mrs Playfair told her, when she was visiting the Wrays one day in the middle of the month. ‘You’ve shaken off that air of mopiness you sometimes have; I’m glad to see it. Now, I think you and your mother ought to come and have dinner with me. I’ve a wireless set now, did you hear? We can all listen in. What do you say? Shall we make it soon? Next Thursday night?’
And – oh, why not? Frances had known Mrs Playfair all her life. Her husband had been the senior broker in Frances’s father’s firm; Frances had gone to school with her daughters; and now she and Frances’s mother sat together on the same small charity committees. She was one of those solid Edwardian women with a passion for organisation, and evenings in her company could sometimes be a little wearing. But – well, it would make for a change. And change was what Frances had been after. So, when Thursday night came round, she donned her puddle-coloured gown and carefully combed and dressed her hair, and she and her mother made the short journey across the crest of Champion Hill to Braemar, Mrs Playfair’s grandish 1870s villa.
‘There!’ said Mrs Playfair as she greeted Frances in the drawing-room. ‘How nice you look! I knew an outing would suit you. You must come and sit in the light of the window, beside Mr Crowther here. I know that you young people can stand any amount of sun. I can’t, that’s for sure!’
Mr Crowther, then, was the other dinner guest. Frances remembered, as she shook his hand, having heard her mother mention him. He had served in the same battalion as Mrs Playfair’s son, Eric – or he had been in the bed next to Eric’s when Eric had died, something like that – and Mrs Playfair had only recently tracked him down. For that was another of Mrs Playfair’s passions: going over and over the details of Eric’s death in Mesopotamia. She corresponded, Frances knew, with chaplains, nurses, surgeons, colonels. She had photographs of Eric’s grave, and of the place where he had fallen. She had books, maps, plans – could shut her eyes, she liked to boast, and see the streets of Baghdad as vividly as she could picture those of Camberwell.