The Paying Guests(73)

But her mother didn’t settle. If anything, she grew more restless, coming out to the kitchen, getting in the way. She regretted now, she said, having missed morning service. It would have given her the chance to share the news of Mr Barber’s assault. She’d begun to think that she and Frances ought to caution the neighbours. Could the food be left to itself for an hour? If the two of them set off right away, they could catch people in the lull before luncheon.

Frances looked at her in dismay. ‘You don’t really need me to tag along, do you?’

‘Well, yes, I think I should like you to come, when it’s such a serious matter as this.’

And seeing how pinched she looked, Frances resigned herself to it. She moved the pans from the stove and did her best to put herself tidy. They called on their immediate neighbours first, the Goldings on one side, the elderly Desborough sisters on the other. They crossed the road to the Dawsons, then went down to the Lambs, then climbed the hill by the cinder lane and finished up at Mrs Playfair’s. Everyone, of course, responded in the same way. To think of such a thing happening in the neighbourhood! On their very door-steps, practically! Yes, the police must certainly be informed. Mr Lamb would talk to them himself. No, nothing had been the same since the War. Civilised behaviour had gone out of the window. It was all very well to blame lack of employment, but the plain fact was there were jobs aplenty; it was the men who put themselves out of work by insisting on unrealistic wages. They had had to be conscripted into defending their country while the sons of the gentry had willingly laid down their lives. And now respectable people feared to walk down their own street!

Frances couldn’t bear it. At Braemar she left the drawing-room while Mrs Playfair was in full flow, and wandered through the open French windows to the garden. She felt so hollowed out by tiredness and uncertainty that she seemed to be floating. The Siamese cats trotted beside her along the gravel paths; she passed the bench where she had once sat with limp Mr Crowther, and arrived at last at the garden pond. A few stout orange fish were just visible in the murk, and a leaf was travelling across the surface of the water as if propelled by tiny oars. That made her think, with a pang, of Ewart, of the ‘little row-boat’. She remembered being squashed beside him on Netta’s sofa. It felt like a century ago. Then, clear across the garden, she heard the midday ting, ting, ting of one of Mrs Playfair’s clocks, and – What in God’s name was she doing there? She ought to be back with Lilian. Why had she left her, without a word, without even any kind of note? She began almost to panic about it. She had the idea that the two of them had whipped something into life the night before, something like a humming top that, unless she were at home to keep up its whirl, would falter, would tilt, would clip the ground and skitter away to a standstill.

But perhaps the faltering, the skittering, had already occurred. For when, in a fizz of impatience, she got her mother back to the house; when she had climbed the stairs and heard Leonard giving one of his leisurely yodelling yawns; when she had passed the sitting-room doorway and glimpsed Lilian herself, blandly shaking a Sunday table-cloth out of its folds, it seemed for an unbalancing moment as if she might have slipped back in time, or else as if the embrace in the scullery, her hand between Lilian’s legs – as if it had all been some sort of hallucination.

She went into her bedroom, began numbly to take off her outdoor things; and she was just easing a foot from its shoe when she saw that on the cabinet beside her bed someone had placed a sprig of silk flowers in a red-and-gold jar. The flowers were blue forget-me-nots, and might have come from the trimming on a hat. The jar could only have belonged to Lilian. She went across to it, lifted the flowers to her face, touched her lips to the dainty silk petals. The thought that some time in the past hour, and all, presumably, without Leonard’s knowledge, Lilian had found the flowers, had perhaps cut them from their setting, had put them into the jar, had slipped in here with them – the thought set off a quick, sharp movement inside her, a wriggling sensation, like a fish on a hook. She gazed at the wall of her room. How far was Lilian from her now? Fifteen feet? Twenty, at most? She heard Leonard yawning again. Oh, go away, she begged him silently as the yawn extended itself into another yodel. Go away! Go anywhere! For ten minutes! For five! She felt no trace of guilt at thinking it, just as she had felt none the night before while making love to his wife. She saw him simply as some tiresome negligible thing that was keeping her from Lilian, like the bricks in the wall, the mortar, the paper, the air.

But he did not go away. And the roast was over-browning. So she gave up and went downstairs, counting on his coming to visit the WC; planning to dart up to Lilian the moment he did. Perversely, he didn’t appear. In mounting frustration, she drained the vegetables, stirred the gravy… But it wasn’t until hours later, when the lunch had been eaten and the dishes washed and dried, and she had almost given up on the day as utterly wasted, wasted, that she finally heard him on the stair. She left it a moment to be sure, then made an excuse to her mother and went softly and swiftly upstairs.

Lilian must have known that she would come: she was hovering in the sitting-room doorway, looking not at all how she’d looked that morning; looking flushed in a different way; looking open-eyed, open-faced. They stood on the landing, close together but too nervous to embrace.

‘You left me flowers,’ whispered Frances.

‘You don’t mind that I went into your room?’