The Paying Guests(48)
The room quickly began to resemble Frances’s notion of an opium den. Lilian and Leonard were sitting so loosely on the sofa that they were practically lolling, Lilian with her knees drawn up, Leonard low, his legs out in front of him, his feet on the red leather pouffe. Frances had been keeping near the front of the easy chair all this time, but the sight of the two of them lounging like that made the pose feel unnatural. She leaned back, giving herself over to the plush. Leonard drew her attention to a lever fitted at the side of the chair. Slightly wary, she pulled it – and with a grinding, collapsing motion the chair transformed itself into a recliner. Her head went back, her feet came up, and she felt the gin in a rush as she tilted. She might have been a hollow vessel with the liquor inside her, its surface spreading as she approached the horizontal. She said to herself, in astonishment, ‘I’m a little drunk! Christ, how squalid!’ Again, though, the knowledge had no bite. It seemed hardly to concern her. And the Barbers, of course, were drunker, had been at it longer than she had. She still had that advantage over them, that crucial touch of superiority. As for the chair – it was a revelation! A masterpiece of engineering! Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable…
In what appeared to be no time at all she lifted her glass and was once again surprised to find it empty; and once again Leonard noticed, rose, rounded up the empty tumblers and took them off to be refilled. But when he had returned and handed out the glasses he stood and gazed around the room, drawing in his lower lip, making a clicking, calculating sound against it with his mobile little tongue.
Lilian was watching him over the rim of her tumbler. ‘What are you looking for?’
He spoke to Frances instead. ‘How about a game of something, Frances?’
‘A game?’ She thought he must mean, perhaps, Charades, at which she was hopeless, painfully bad. ‘Oh, no. I must get to bed. It must be late, mustn’t it?’
No one answered her. Lilian was still watching Leonard. He had gone across the room again; now, from the lowest shelf of a bookcase, he pulled a battered card box. As he brought it back into the lamplight Frances caught sight of its colourful lid.
‘Snakes and Ladders!’
He grinned. ‘You like this game?’ The grin grew sly. ‘So does Lily. Don’t you, Lil?’
In reply, Lilian leaned and tried to snatch the box from his hands. He held it out of her reach, however, and, once he had kicked aside the pouffe, he unfolded the board and set it down in the middle of the floor, then picked out three wooden counters – yellow for Frances, blue for Lilian, red for himself – assertively thumbing them on to the carpet like a gambler setting down coins. Frances leaned closer, for a better look. Then, since it seemed like a lark, she clambered out of the chair, kicked off her shoes, and joined him on the floor – doing it all rather unsteadily, but taking her glass of gin with her. The counters were chipped, rubbed pale at the edges. The board was furred and loose in its folds. The game looked about thirty years old, but the illustrations were still acidly colourful, and where a number was faded it had been inked back into its square. Some of the inky numerals were extravagant; they grew limbs, became flowers, hearts, musical notes. And several of the snakes had been given top hats, or spectacles and whiskers.
Lilian was still sitting on the sofa. Frances said, ‘Won’t you join us?’
She shook her head, her expression veiled. ‘I don’t want to play.’
‘I’d have thought you’d like all these colours.’
Lilian looked at her, looked away. Leonard sniggered. ‘She doesn’t like losing.’
She frowned at him. ‘That’s not true!’
‘She’s a bad sport.’
‘Is she?’ asked Frances.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘She cheats like anything.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘No, I don’t! He’s the cheater!’
‘Prove it, then.’
‘Yes, come on!’ said her husband, reaching for her and pulling her down to the floor.
She came with a bump, spilling some of her drink on the way, and when she tried to return to the sofa he reached and pulled her back again. So she gave in – still refusing to smile, though; pulling a cushion from the sofa and shifting herself on to it, tucking her skirt around her legs, but doing it with cross, clumsy movements, then sitting with her glass raised, hiding her mouth.
Frances ran fingers across the board, tracing the curves of one of the snakes.
‘What a nice old game this is.’
Leonard was straightening the spinner, a creased card hexagon on a wooden spike. He said, ‘It was Dougie’s, when we were boys. Don’t go sucking on your yellow counter, will you? I think it might have arsenic in it.’
She heard herself titter. ‘Was it your brother who added the hearts and the whiskers?’
He twirled the spinner against his palm. ‘Ah. No, that was Lily and me.’
There was something behind his words. Raising her eyes, she saw him smirking. Before she knew what she was doing she had leaned and poked his knee. ‘What? What is it?’
He looked at Lilian, and opened his mouth to answer. But Lilian spoke more quickly.
‘It’s just a thing to make the game more silly. It’s just something Len and I sometimes do. If you land on a square with musical notes drawn on it, you have to sing something – a song, I mean. If you land on a flower, you have to – well, you have to pretend to be a flower, and the other person has to say what flower you are. I told you it was silly!’