The Paying Guests(49)
Frances had tittered again. But there was more, she could see. She pointed to a square with a heart drawn on it.
‘And what happens if you land on this?’
‘Nothing. – Don’t, Len!’
He protested. ‘Frances wants to know! It’s only fair to tell her the rules. It’s like this, Frances. When Lily lands on a heart, she —’
Lilian put down her glass and reached across the board to hit him. She swung her hand hard, but he caught her wrist and they struggled. It wasn’t quite like their tussles from before, which had been manufactured as if for Frances’s benefit. They fought seriously this time, reddening with the effort of it; for several seconds they were almost still, in a sort of perfect tension, braced against each other but attempting to pull apart, like a couple of repelling magnets.
Then Lilian let out her breath in a burst of nervous laughter and Leonard, making the most of her moment of weakness, got hold of her other hand and pinned her wrists together.
‘When Lily lands on that,’ he told Frances, strained and breathless and beginning to laugh himself, ‘she has to take off one of her things!’
Frances had been expecting something of the sort. All the same, the words came as a shock, and her first, flustered thought was: Can Mother hear? But the room, with its shut door and its cone of lamplight, had begun to feel not so much confining as insulated, snug. Lilian was rubbing at her wrists where her husband had gripped them, looking flushed from the struggle, looking vexed, embarrassed, excited – Frances wasn’t sure which. Leonard’s smirk had broadened.
She met his gaze as if meeting a challenge. ‘Just the one thing?’
‘Just the one.’
‘And how about when you land on it?’
‘When I land on it,’ he said, with his worst smirk yet, ‘well, then Lily has to take off something else.’
‘I see. And what will happen – well, if I land on it?’
He thought that over, or pretended to, stroking his bristly chin. ‘Now, there’s a poser. We’ve never played, you understand, with a third party… If you land on a heart, Frances, I should say – well, that Lilian ought to take off something else. Though you’d be welcome to take off something too, if you’d like to.’
As a piece of gallantry, she thought, that was rather belated – if an invitation to remove one’s clothes over a game of Snakes and Ladders could be construed as gallantry at all. But she was at the high point of drunkenness now, excited by the gin and the tobacco – excited too, despite herself, by the atmosphere of raciness and intimacy into which the little party was plunging. And the evening had started so unpromisingly! She recalled, as if from a distance, her own bad temper, Mrs Playfair, Mr Crowther —
Oh, but Mr Crowther was a wet. Fancy sitting in a twilit garden with a girl and fussing over a Siamese cat. She could have done better than that herself!
And suddenly time had made a queer leap forward and, without her quite knowing how, the game had begun. One needed a six, Leonard told her, to start, and she spent a frustrated few minutes turning up other numbers, while first he and then Lilian sent their men hopping across the board. And when she did join the game at last, she promptly landed on one of the doctored squares, one with a treble clef drawn on it, which meant she had to sing a snatch of song. She sang the first thing that came into her head; it was ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. She sang the first two lines only, and pitched the opening note so badly that the high ‘any’ came out as a tortured squeak. But Leonard applauded as if she had given an operatic solo, gripping a fresh cigarette at the side of his mouth and calling around it, as he clapped, ‘Bravo!’
The next number he spun took his counter to a square with a drawing of a flower on it. He went through a writhing, complicated pantomime while Frances and Lilian attempted to guess the flower he was representing. A daisy? A rose? It turned out to be creeping ivy – which led the three of them into a noisy argument about whether ivy could be considered to be a flower at all, or was simply a plant. He ended the debate by spinning Lilian’s number for her and swiftly hopping her man across the board. Whether he deliberately muddled the move or not, Frances wasn’t sure, but the counter went sliding down a top-hatted snake to end on one of the inky hearts.
‘No,’ Lilian said quickly, ‘that’s not fair!’
‘Yes it is. Isn’t it fair, Frances?’
‘Well —’
‘There. Frances says it’s fair; and Frances is a high-brow. I told you she cheats, Frances. She’s all promises, this one.’
Lilian put out her foot and kicked him, hard; Frances heard the crack of her heel against his shin-bone. But while he howled and clutched his leg she kept still for a moment, clearly thinking the forfeit over. Then she rose to her knees, drew off her clattering bangles and slapped them down in tipsy triumph beside the board.
Leonard cried immediately: ‘Cheat! She’s cheating again! Bracelets don’t count!’
And, ‘Cheat!’ echoed Frances. She cupped her hands around her mouth. ‘Boo! Shame!’
Lilian made a gesture as if to swat them both away. ‘Yes, they do count. They do, if creeping ivy can be a flower.’
‘Rubbish!’
‘They do!’
Reluctantly, they let their protests subside. But Leonard looked at Frances in disgust. ‘What’ll it be next time? A hair from her head?’