The Paying Guests(56)
And perhaps the dimness made it easier for Lilian to speak. As she crushed out her cigarette she said quietly, ‘What you told me that time —’
‘I oughtn’t to have said anything,’ said Frances, adding her own cigarette stub to the ashtray, then moving the ashtray aside.
‘Was it true, though, what you said? A love affair with a girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘There wasn’t a man?’
‘No, there wasn’t a man. There never has been a man, for me. It seems I haven’t the – the man microbe, or whatever it is one needs. My poor mother’s convinced that there must be one in me somewhere. She’s done everything to shake it loose save turn me upside down by my heels. But —’
‘But how did it begin? How did you know?’
‘I fell in love. How does anyone know that?’
‘But where did you meet?’
‘My friend and I? We met in Hyde Park, in the War. I had gone there with Noel, to listen to the speakers. It was just before conscription came in, and a man was speaking against it. He was being heckled and jostled by the crowd; it was shameful, horrible. But there, going calmly about, handing out pamphlets on his behalf and looking as though she wouldn’t care if someone spat in her face because of it, was a small, slight, fair-haired girl in a velvet tam-o’-shanter… I took a pamphlet, and went to a meeting – I had to lie to my parents about it – and there she was again. She didn’t remember me from Hyde Park, though I remembered her. After the meeting I walked her home, all the way from Victoria to Upper Holloway. In the perishing cold, too! I think I began to be in love with her by the time we crossed the Euston Road. We started to be friends. She stayed here, often. And then, suddenly, she loved me.’
‘But weren’t you shocked?’
‘That someone should love me? I was astounded.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘I know you didn’t. No, I wasn’t shocked. The whole thing was too marvellous. There had been romances in my schooldays – but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect’s eyes… This wasn’t like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up. Well, we thought ourselves grown-up. But the War did make young people wiser, didn’t it? John Arthur had already died by then. Christina – my friend – had lost cousins. We were impatient. We had – oh, such energy! We began to want to live together. We planned it, seriously. We did everything seriously in those days. Christina took typewriting and book-keeping classes. We looked at rooms, we saved our money. Our parents thought it a nonsense, of course. Then they made it into a fight – endless, exhausting, the same quarrel over and over, how could we think of leaving home, how would it look, we were too young, people would suppose us fast, no man would ever want to marry us. But even the quarrels were thrilling, in their way. Christina and I talked as though we were part of a new society! Everything was changing. Why shouldn’t we change too? We wanted to shake off tradition, caste, all that…’
She paused, and took a sip of water, feeling the scratch of her throat. Lilian was watching her. ‘Then what happened?’
She set the glass down with a chink. ‘Oh, then we got into that scrape with the police, when I threw my shoes at that MP. My father threatened to send me away. I’m afraid I laughed in his face. But my mother —’ She drew a breath. ‘My mother went through my things, and found a letter from Christina, and read it. I think she’d known all along that the friendship had something queer about it. She took the letter to Chrissy’s parents. They turned out Chrissy’s room, and found letters from me. Well, it was clear what the letters meant. I ended up with most of the blame, perhaps because I was a little older. They made me out to be some sort of vampire —’
‘Vampire!’
‘You know what I mean. One of those women, neurotic schoolmistresses and so on, who get written about in books. They talked of sending me to a doctor – to get my glands examined, they said. – Oh, I can’t bear to think of it now.’ She shuddered, remembering a scene, like something from a frightful dream, her father’s stillness, his silence, the cold distaste in his expression: worse, infinitely worse and more shaming, than twenty years of bluster. ‘If we’d been bolder,’ she went on, ‘we might have escaped. I think perhaps we ought to have tried to. We ought to have stolen away, like thieves. But we decided to face the thing out. People were saying that the War wouldn’t last another year. We thought that, once it was over, everything would somehow be different… And while we were waiting, Noel was lost. That was the March of ’eighteen. It had been bad when John Arthur had died, but after Noel – I don’t know. My father made an invalid of himself. My mother went to pieces for a while. Our servants had left us; now we had a series of cooks and chars, one small calamity after another. It seemed easier to begin taking care of the house myself…
‘And then, in the August, my father died too; and it all came out about our money being gone. The new society I had planned with Christina began to look rather flimsy. The Armistice came, but what could I do? I couldn’t leave my mother, after everything she’d been through. She and I never discussed it, we never spoke a word about it; she knew what Chrissy was to me, but – no, I couldn’t leave her. I said to myself just what your family said to you: that millions of men had been lost, that millions of women had given up lovers, brothers, sons, ambitions… It was one more sacrifice, that’s all. I thought of it as a sort of bravery.’