The Paying Guests(50)

Lilian got hold of her drink, and the game continued. At Leonard’s next turn his counter landed on a ‘musical’ square, and that perked him up. He sang ‘Everybody’s Doing It’ – sang it in a boisterous Cockney manner, clipping his ‘g’s, hooking his thumbs into his armpits like a costermonger, finally leaning across the board to his wife and prodding her in the stomach and thighs in time to the song.

He continued to hum as the game proceeded. He drank off the last of his beer while Lilian and Frances took their turns, but Frances saw him gazing sideways down at the board as he swallowed, clearly calculating his next move. When he took hold of the spinner he gave it such a violent twist that it went cartwheeling across the floor and disappeared into the shadow of the sofa. He leapt after it, and brought it back saying, ‘Five! Most definitely five!’ And as he tripped his man forward it became clear that he had engineered the move in order to take the counter to another heart.

He looked glumly at Lilian. ‘Oh, dear.’

Frances looked at Lilian too. She had drawn down another cushion from the sofa and was hugging it to her bosom. She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Now, don’t be like that,’ he said reasonably. ‘You know the rules. I didn’t make them.’

‘Yes, you did!’

‘No, I didn’t! It was Mr… Kidd.’ He had picked up the lid of the box and was pretending to read the manufacturer’s instructions. ‘He was one of those dirty-minded Victorian so-and-sos, I expect. Yes, here it is, in black and white. “Whenever a player lands on a square marked with a heart, the lady in the room with the shadiest character must remove one of her garments.” Well, I mean to say,’ he appealed to his wife, ‘that can’t be Frances, can it?’

Lilian had been smiling at last, but at his words her smile grew fixed, and now it wavered and broke and she turned her head from him. Undeterred, he pressed on. ‘“If said lady refuses to remove one garment, as a forfeit she must remove two! Bracelets not to be counted!”’ He punched the lid with his finger, holding it up as if to display it, then whisking it away. ‘Well, we’ll be kind and let the bracelet business pass. But really, Lil, rules is rules. Come along now, play the game. You’re showing yourself up. Good heavens, you’d think she’d never undressed in front of a gentleman before, wouldn’t you, Frances? You’d think —’

‘All right,’ said Lilian sharply. She got to her feet, dropping the cushion, but then for some reason stepping on to it, moving about to get her balance. The gin seemed to have caught up with her, all of it at once. She made a lurch to the side, her heel came down hard on the carpeted boards, and her barmaidy bosom gave a bounce.

Frances thought again of her mother, trying to sleep in the room below. What time was it, anyhow? She had no idea. She looked for the clock and couldn’t find it.

Leonard, naturally, was as serious as ever – saying to his wife, in a warning way, ‘Now, remember what I said. No hairs, or any tricks like that. No earrings. No —’

‘Oh, let me alone!’ she said. She stood frowning for a moment, then came to some decision and, turning, faced the chimney-breast, putting her back to him and to Frances. The back was squarest to him, however: Frances, watching from her place by the easy chair, suddenly unable to look away, saw her lift the hem of her skirt and grope beneath it for the top of her stocking; she saw the stocking grow opaque as it was eased down over her thigh, her knee, her calf and lifted foot. By the time it was free, Leonard was whistling like a workman on the street. Lilian turned back to him and dipped an ironic, inelegant curtsy. She screwed the stocking into a ball and made as if to throw it – her stance suggesting, as her hand came up, that she was wondering, just for a second, whether to throw it at him or at Frances. She chose her husband: she threw it hard, but it unrolled as it flew. He caught it and ran it across his moustache.

‘Now,’ he said as he did it, ‘a more scrupulous fellow than me might say that, since stockings come in pairs, they ought really to count as one garment… But, hell, I’ll be generous.’

He put the stocking around his neck and began to fuss with it, trying to tie it into a bow above his ordinary collar. Lilian sat heavily back down on her cushion and tucked her skirt around her legs. But the skirt reached only to her ankles, leaving her feet illuminated baldly by the lamp; and somehow the sight of the two plump feet together like that, one of them stockinged, one of them bare, was more unsettling, more indefinably lewd, than if both had been naked. Frances kept drawing her gaze away from them, but the gaze kept creeping back. Purely to break the spell of the thing she lifted her glass, not wanting the gin at all, but recklessly drinking it down anyhow; beginning to feel a little sick as a result.

Leonard had finished the bow at his throat. He looked like a comical cat on a picture postcard. Slapping his hands together he returned to the board. ‘Allons-y! Whose turn is it next? Well? Frances? Is it yours?’

It was his wife’s turn, Frances knew. Probably he knew it himself. But Lilian kept to her cushion, saying nothing.

‘Perhaps we ought to put the game away now,’ Frances said.

‘Put it away?’ said Leonard. ‘You’re joking! Things are just warming up. Come on, whose turn is it? Is it yours?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘I thought as much. Let’s have you then, Lil! Don’t keep me and Frances waiting. I want my second stocking, don’t I?’