The Paying Guests(5)
This room had still been the dining-room, a month before. Frances had painted over the old red paper and rearranged the pictures, but, as with the new kitchen upstairs, the result was not quite convincing. Her mother’s bits of bedroom furniture seemed to her to be sitting as tensely as unhappy visitors: she could feel them pining for their grooves and smooches in the floor of the room above. Some of the old dining-room furniture had had to stay in here too, for want of anywhere else to put it, and the effect was an overcrowded one, with a suggestion of elderliness and a touch – just a touch – of the sick chamber. It was the sort of room she could remember from childhood visits to ailing great-aunts. All it really lacked, she thought, was the whiff of a commode, and the little bell for summoning the whiskery spinster daughter.
She quickly turned her back on that image. Upstairs, one of the Barbers could be heard crossing their sitting-room floor – Mr Barber, she guessed it was, from the bounce and briskness of the tread; Mrs Barber’s was more sedate. Looking up at the ceiling, she followed the steps with her eyes.
Beside her, her mother also gazed upward. ‘A day of great changes,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Are they still unpacking their things? They’re excited, I suppose. I remember when your father and I first came here, we were just the same. They seem pleased with the house, don’t you think?’ She had lowered her voice. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’
Frances answered in the same almost furtive tone. ‘She does, at any rate. She looks like she can’t believe her luck. I’m not so sure about him.’
‘Well, it’s a fine old house. And a home of their own: that means a great deal when one is first married.’
‘Oh, but they’re hardly newly-weds, are they? Didn’t they tell us that they’d been married for three years? Straight out of the War, I suppose. No children, though.’
Her mother’s tone changed slightly. ‘No.’ And after a second, the one thought plainly having led to the next, she added, ‘Such a pity that the young women today all feel they must make up.’
Frances reached for the book and studied the acrostic. ‘Isn’t it? And on a Sunday, too.’
She felt her mother’s level gaze. ‘Don’t imagine that I can’t tell when you are making fun of me, Frances.’
Upstairs, Mrs Barber laughed. Something light was dropped or thrown and went skittering across the boards. Frances gave up on the puzzle. ‘What do you think her background can be?’
Her mother had closed the book and was putting it aside. ‘Whose?’
She gave a jerk of her chin. ‘Mrs B’s. I should say her father’s some sort of branch manager, shouldn’t you? A mother who’s rather “nice”. “Indian Love Lyrics” on the gramophone, perhaps a brother doing well for himself in the Merchant Navy. Piano lessons for the girls. An outing to the Royal Academy once a year…’ She began to yawn. Covering her mouth with the back of her wrist, she went on, through the yawn, ‘One good thing, I suppose, about their being so young: they’ve only his parents to compare us with. They won’t know that we really haven’t a clue what we’re doing. So long as we act the part of landladies with enough gusto, then landladies is what we will be.’
Her mother looked pained. ‘How baldly you put it! You might be Mrs Seaview, of Worthing.’
‘Well, there’s no shame in being a landlady; not these days. I for one aim to enjoy landladying.’
‘If you would only stop saying the word!’
Frances smiled. But her mother was plucking at the silk binding of a blanket, a look of real distress beginning to creep into her expression; she was an inch, Frances knew, from saying, ‘Oh, it would break your dear father’s heart!’ And since even now, nearly four years after his death, Frances couldn’t think of her father without wanting to grind her teeth, or swear, or leap up and smash something, she hastily turned the conversation. Her mother was involved in the running of two or three local charities: she asked after those. They spoke for a time about a forthcoming bazaar.
Once she saw her mother’s face clear, become simply tired and elderly, she got to her feet.
‘Now, have you everything you need? You don’t want a biscuit, in case you wake?’
Her mother began to arrange herself for sleep. ‘No, I don’t want a biscuit. But you may put out the light for me, Frances.’
She lifted the plaits away from her shoulders and settled her head on her pillow. Her glasses had left little bruise-like dints on the bridge of her nose. As Frances reached to the lamp there were more footsteps in the room above; and then her hazel eyes returned to the ceiling.
‘It might be Noel or John Arthur up there,’ she murmured, as the light went down.
And, yes, thought Frances a moment later, lingering in the shadowy hall, it might be; for she could smell tobacco smoke now, and hear some sort of masculine muttering up on the landing, along with the tap of a slippered male foot… And just like that, like a knee or an elbow receiving a blow on the wrong spot, her heart was jangling. How grief could catch one out, still! She had to stand at the foot of the stairs while the fit of sorrow ran through her. But if only, she thought, as she began to climb – she hadn’t thought it in ages – if only, if only she might turn the stair and find one of her brothers at the top – John Arthur, say, looking lean, looking bookish, looking like a whimsical monk in his brown Jaeger dressing-gown and Garden City sandals.