The Paying Guests(78)
But she longed to talk about it. The longing mounted, day by day. And who was there to tell, save Chrissy? She had to do it, or burst. One night there was rain, and the following morning was cooler. It seemed a sort of sign. She saw to her chores, had lunch with her mother, then took a bus to Oxford Circus.
A moment after she had made the turn on to Clipstone Street she caught sight of Christina herself, a hundred yards ahead of her, just emerging from her building and setting off in the direction of the Tottenham Court Road. She was hatless, and dressed in one of her creased paisley frocks, with a short green velvet jacket over the top; under her arm she had what looked like a brown-paper parcel. She hadn’t spotted Frances, and her pace was brisk. Frances hurried after her, but the distance between them narrowed only gradually; it wasn’t until Christina paused at a crossing on the Tottenham Court Road itself that she was able to tap her on the shoulder.
‘You’re Christina Lucas,’ she said breathlessly, ‘and I claim my ten shillings!’
Christina turned, startled, blinking. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it? I’d begun to think you must be dead. Where on earth have you been?’
‘I’m sorry, Chrissy. The month has run clean away from me.’
‘Well, I can’t give you tea, or anything like that. I’ve this package to deliver.’
‘I know. I’ve been trailing after you for the past ten minutes. What a pace you set! Where are you headed?’
‘To Clerkenwell.’
‘To your newspaper people? Well, I’ll go along with you. May I? Look, here’s our chance.’
A policeman had put up his white-gloved hand. Frances offered her elbow, and Christina caught hold of it; they crossed the road and went on, arm in arm, with matching strides. The day had the odd glamour that a grey day can have in the middle of a heat-wave. The smells were tart London ones: petrol, soot, manure, asphalt. There were still pools of rainwater in the dips of the pavement, and once or twice Christina steadied herself against Frances’s arm in order to hop across them. Aside from that, her grip was light. She seemed slim, almost bird-like, in comparison with Lilian. ‘How little you are,’ Frances said once. ‘There’s nothing to you, I’d forgotten. Let me carry that parcel for you.’
‘Carry my parcel? Don’t be absurd.’
They zig-zagged their way through the Bloomsbury streets, crossing the garden at Russell Square, losing themselves for a while in a maze of warehouses east of the Gray’s Inn Road; then Christina found a landmark and regained her sense of direction, and fifteen minutes later they made a turn into a dilapidated Georgian square. At the bottom of a set of area steps a door was propped open; the dim old kitchen beyond had been turned into an untidy office, while in the scullery to which it led a man in his shirt-sleeves could just be glimpsed, feeding paper in and out of a noisy treadle printing-press. Another man came to greet Christina and receive her package; Frances hung back, watching, while its contents were discussed. The man was youngish, with an Oxford voice, and had the haunted sort of looks that, if she hadn’t known better, she would have guessed he had got in the trenches. But he had been an objector, she remembered Chrissy having told her – one of the first, when it was hardest – and his health had been broken, not in France, but in an English prison.
The small errand was soon concluded. She and Christina climbed the steps, and, ‘Where shall we make for next?’ she asked.
‘Don’t you have to hurry home?’
‘Not really. Let’s wander further. I – well, I’d like the chance to talk.’
So they set off again, heading south by the sun, but taking turns more or less at random. The route grew steadily more shabby, but became fascinating too, a mixture of little businesses – leather works, sanitary works, glass merchants, rag-and-bone men – and street after street of elderly houses, some that had once been grand and were now let as sad-looking rooms, others that had never been grand in the first place and were all but derelict. They paused at a patch of waste ground, possibly the result of a Zeppelin raid: it gave a view of a sprawling, weather-boarded building with a jutting upper storey that must have been there, they decided, for three hundred years, since before the Great Fire.
By the time they had hurried through the stink of Smithfield Market, crossed Newgate Street, and were peering up at the gold figure on the dome of the Old Bailey, Christina had begun to limp. She had the remains of a corn, she said, that was giving her trouble. The limp grew worse around the start of Fleet Street, so they turned into an alley, and in the shadow of some meeting-house or chapel they found a small railed yard with three or four ancient tombs in it; they sat down to rest among the blurry inscriptions. The traffic sounds were muted here. On the other side of the railings men went by: clerks, errand-boys, even a couple of barristers in wigs and gowns. But the yard was a gloomy one, and, seeing that the men paid no attention to Christina and her, Frances got out her tobacco and papers and discreetly rolled a couple of cigarettes.
Christina yawned as the match was struck. She took a single puff, then let herself droop sideways, resting her head on Frances’s shoulder.
‘What tired old ladies we’ve become! And to think how far you used to make me walk. What a tyrant you were. Do you remember you wanted us to walk down every street in London? I still have the little atlas we kept, full of our serious notes. We didn’t get very far, did we? Shall we start it again?’