The Paying Guests(76)
She remembered the housework. She washed, dressed, went down, took care of her mother’s bedroom, saw to the drawing-room and the stairs – doing it all at maniac speed, whirling the feather-broom like a dervish. Even so, when her mother returned at lunch-time she had not quite finished the hall floor.
‘Oh, dear,’ said her mother, seeing her there on the kneeling mat.
She answered with appalling glibness. ‘Yes, I’m running late today. One thing after another going wrong. How’s Mr Garnish?’
‘He’s very well. Oh, dear.’
‘Now, don’t mind about this. I’ve very nearly finished.’
She took away the pail of water, then flung together a salad lunch. They ate it outside, beneath the linden tree. She kept up a lively conversation with her mother throughout the meal, all about Mr Garnish’s charity, which found seaside homes for sickly boys and girls of the parish. But once their plates were cleared they sat in a companionable silence, and she gazed around at the flower-beds with that new clarity, that new wonder. The blue of the delphiniums, for example: she’d never seen such a blue in her life. The marigolds and the orange snapdragons glowed like flames. Bees clambered in and out of velvety hollows, dusty with pollen: she seemed to see every clinging yellow grain, every wing-beat of every insect. Then she happened to look back at the house just as Lilian, dressed for Walworth, went past the staircase window, and she felt a rush of muddled excitements, a physical fluster – was that love? If it wasn’t, then – Christ, it was something very like it. But if it was – oh, if it was —!
‘You’re very thoughtful, Frances,’ her mother said mildly. ‘What are you thinking of?’
Beginning to gather the lunch-things, Frances answered without a pause. ‘I was thinking of a man I met at Lilian’s sister’s party, as it happens.’
Her mother looked interested. ‘Oh, yes?’
‘We talked of making a day-trip to Henley some time. I dare say it won’t come off, though.’
It was as easy as that, to give a fillip to her mother’s mood. A few days before, she would have despised herself for doing it; now the two of them returned to the house, and once she had taken care of the washing-up they spent a pleasant afternoon together in the drawing-room, sitting in their chairs at the open window. Lilian returned from Walworth, but Frances didn’t go out to her. Her blood leapt at the sound of her step. She felt that physical fluster again, in her breasts and between her legs. But she nursed the feeling, in secret – like cradling a suckling child, she thought.
Then Leonard came home. He came later than usual. She was in the kitchen, putting plates to warm, alert for the sound of his key in the lock, when, glancing out at the garden, she was startled to see him letting himself in through the door in the wall at the end of it. She barely had time to arrange her expression before he had picked his way up the path and was in the kitchen with her, wiping the dust from his feet. Yes, he’d come by the lane, he told her, rather than by his regular route, because he’d been down at Camberwell police station, telling them all about his ‘little spot of fun’. A sergeant had taken down the particulars, but didn’t hold out much hope of catching the fellow. He’d said what Leonard had said himself: London these days was so full of criminal types that looking for one would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
He yawned as he spoke, and against his tired, yellowish face the bruises beneath his eyes looked darker than ever. He stayed for ten minutes, however, describing the ribbing he had got from the chaps at the office; he made a point, too, of mentioning the dinner that had ended so disastrously on Saturday night. But he gave a slightly different account of it this time, she noticed. The assurance men he had previously described as a lot of snobs he now dismissed, scornfully, as a ‘bunch of chinless Old Boys’. He and Charlie had made their escape, he said, as soon as they decently could. No, there were better ways of doing business than getting into bed with a load of wets…
He was plainly trying hard to forget the humiliations of the evening; and, oddly, the very hollowness of his boasts filled Frances with pity. It isn’t anything to do with him, Lilian had said earlier, and that had seemed true, that had seemed vital, with her face an inch from Frances’s, with her hand pressed hard over Frances’s heart. But he was her husband after all… He went off at last, twirling his bowler, whistling ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’, and, We can’t, thought Frances, with a plunge into desolation. We can’t! Surely Lilian would think the same?
But when she went up to bed that night she found that a scrap of folded paper had been pushed beneath her door. The paper had an X put on it, that was all: a kiss. One of Lilian’s full, wet kisses. The sight of it brought on a return of that wine-glass quiver. For twenty minutes or more she waited for Lilian to emerge from her sitting-room; hearing her step at last she called out to the landing, pretending that she wanted her opinion on the trimming of a gown. They stood inside the partly open door, pressed silently together – mouths, breasts, hips, thighs, even their slippered feet tangling – while, just across the stairwell, Leonard mixed up his indigestion powder and belched. It ought to have been squalid, but somehow it wasn’t squalid at all. Frances no longer thought, We can’t. She thought, We have to! She thought, I’ll die if we don’t! She got into bed in the darkness, wondering if Lilian would, after all, come to her once Leonard was asleep. She lay there willing her to do it – lifting her head at every creak of every cooling floorboard, imagining that the sound was Lilian’s step; then sinking back again, disappointed.