The Paying Guests(58)
When Leonard returned from work that evening he came almost immediately downstairs again, putting his head around the kitchen door and gazing in with a guilty expression. His brow was marked, as usual, by the line of his bowler hat, but his face was pale, the whites of his eyes looking dingy as a result, and the ends of his moustache were drooping.
Could Frances spare him a minute?
She nodded, and he edged into the room, keeping one hand behind his back, awkwardly.
‘I’ve come to beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘for my behaviour last night. I had a bit too much to drink and I let myself get carried away. I said lots of things I shouldn’t have. It was unforgivable of me. But I hope – well, I hope you’ll take these, and say no hard feelings?’
There was a dullish rattle as he brought round his arm. He had chocolates for her, the box done up with a pink satin ribbon, the lid with a picture of a ballerina on it.
She looked at it in acute embarrassment. ‘You didn’t have to buy me sweets, Leonard.’
‘Well, I wanted to get you something, and the garden’s full of flowers, so I knew roses were no good. And I bet you don’t treat yourself to chocolates very often, do you?’
‘It isn’t me you ought to be apologising to, in any case. It’s Lilian.’
To her surprise, he coloured slightly. ‘I know.’
‘You said some very unkind things to her.’
‘I know, I know. But I didn’t mean a word of it; Lily knows that. I’ve already told her how sorry I am. I’ll find a way to make it up to her… I wish you’d take these chocolates, Frances. I’ve always thought of you and me as being good pals, and I’d hate that to change. You can give them to your mother if you don’t want them yourself. I expect we annoyed her too, didn’t we?’
She wiped her hands on her apron and took the box at last, doing her best to find an expression that would meet the demands of the moment, trying to admire the fancy wrapper, retain a bit of dignity – and all the time, of course, remembering that other charged moment of a few hours before, his wife’s hand an inch from her bosom, easing out that imaginary stake.
He looked relieved. ‘Thank you. It means a lot to me that you’re prepared to do that. I hope you don’t think too badly of me. We – well, we had fun last night, didn’t we, before I forgot my manners?’
His moustache twitched as he spoke, and at the sight of his pink, wet mouth she again felt a ripple of the dark excitement of the night before – like finding the last slosh of gin in a near-empty bottle. That was one current too many, however. Yes, she admitted, they had had fun; but she spoke primly, turning away, putting the chocolates down unopened, and returning to the task he had interrupted – slicing shallots. For a minute or two he lingered, perhaps hoping for more from her. When nothing came he sloped off through the open back door.
He remained in the yard after he’d visited the WC. Glancing out, she saw him with his hands in his trouser pockets, scuffing his feet across cracks in the flagstones. When she looked again a minute later he had wandered on to the lawn: she watched him light himself a cigarette, throw the spent match into the bushes, begin to amble between the flower-beds, occasionally leaning to dead-head a rose. He kept his back to her as he did it; she stood still with the knife in her hand, and what she noticed most of all was the narrowness of his hips and shoulders: he seemed suddenly a lonely and vulnerable figure, drifting about like that. She thought of Lilian’s lost baby; it was his lost baby, too. She recalled the hectic way in which he had whipped on the Snakes and Ladders, as if wanting something from the game, from his wife, from Frances, from the night, determined to goad and goad it until it coughed up or broke.
He’s as unhappy as any of us, she realised.
Or, was he? His cigarette finished, he returned to the house, and what had clicked into place about him for her clicked out again. He looked livelier than before; his moustache had lost its droop. He’d spotted a lawn-mower, he said, tucked away at the end of the garden. The mechanism was all seized up, but he thought he might be able to get it going. He’d take a look at it later, if Frances and her mother didn’t mind.
Frances said he could help himself. He went upstairs for his dinner, and when he reappeared, at just before eight, his jacket was off, his collar and tie were removed, and his sleeves were rolled nearly to his armpits.
But this time Lilian was with him: she sat on the bench beneath the linden tree, watching him spread out a square of oilskin and begin to take the mower apart. When his hands became too greasy for him to light a cigarette, she got the packet out of his pocket and lit one for him. Frances saw it all from the drawing-room window while her mother picked chocolates from the ballerina box.
‘Won’t you have one at all, Frances? After Mr Barber went to so much trouble? I feel quite a glutton, eating all by myself!’
But, no, she wouldn’t eat a chocolate. She couldn’t relax into her mending, either. She was too conscious of Lilian, there at the end of the garden, in her white blouse with the touches of violet at the collar and the cuffs.
But – could she be imagining it? She had the sense that Lilian was conscious of her. She didn’t once look back at the house. She watched as Leonard worked the spanners, nodding in an encouraging way at the bits of machinery he displayed to her, the cogs and the blades and the God knew what. But even as she nodded, even as she murmured, even as she lit that cigarette and leaned to fit it between his lips, a part of her, like a long, long shadow running counter to the sun, was leaning to Frances; Frances was sure of it.