The Paying Guests(83)

Lilian smiled at her, uncertainly. ‘Come back to the floor. I’ll draw the curtains again. We can —’

‘No. I’d better go down.’ She began to get to her feet. ‘Mrs Playfair might send my mother home for something else.’

Lilian kept hold of her. ‘Don’t go.’

‘I must, Lilian.’

‘Well, just – just kiss me, first, will you?’

So, after a moment of resistance, Frances allowed herself to be pulled back to the sofa; and the kiss, as usual, went on and on.



Once her mother had returned, Frances took care to keep the conversation well away from the subject of Lilian. They discussed Patty’s upset stomach, which the dose of arrowroot, it seemed, had done nothing much to calm. But after dinner that evening, as they sat sewing in the drawing-room, her mother mentioned some task she had promised to do for Mrs Playfair – numbering tickets for a forthcoming raffle. Would Frances help? It was easy work, but rather boring. They might do it at the week’s end? Say, Saturday afternoon?

‘Of course,’ said Frances. After a second she added awkwardly, ‘But it might have to be Sunday, I’m afraid. Lilian and I have talked of doing something together on Saturday.’

Her mother was silent after that, sorting through the silks in her basket. She snipped off a length, moistened the end of it, ran it through the eye of a needle. But when she had secured the first of her stitches she said, ‘You’ve been rather in Mrs Barber’s pockets lately, I’ve noticed. Doesn’t Mr Barber miss his wife?’

She said it quietly, without looking up, and sounding so unlike her normal self that Frances’s stomach gave a jump as if she were ten years old. She made a stitch or two in her own work and answered, as lightly as she could, ‘They often spend their Saturdays separately. He plays tennis after work, remember?’

‘I wasn’t thinking only of Saturdays.’

‘Well, Lilian and I have become good friends.’

‘You’re certainly on very familiar terms these days. She must be flattered that you’re taking such an interest in her.’

Frances managed a laugh. ‘Taking an interest? You make it sound as though I’m running a Girls’ Club!’

‘Perhaps you ought to try running a Girls’ Club, or something like it. Mr Garnish asked me only yesterday how you fill your time. I didn’t know what to tell him.’

‘I fill my time by looking after this house.’

‘Yes, well, it doesn’t seem to have been especially well looked after just lately.’

Frances put down her mending. ‘Oh, Mother, that’s a bit rum. One minute you can’t bear to see me scrubbing a floor. The next you’re complaining that the floor hasn’t been cleaned.’

Her mother had coloured. ‘I’m not complaining, Frances. You know how I feel about you and your chores; you know how very grateful I am for all you’ve done. But wasn’t it for the sake of the house that we brought in Mr and Mrs Barber in the first place? If the housework is to suffer because you spend your mornings with her, smoking cigarettes and dancing polkas… Doesn’t Mrs Barber have chores of her own? Or perhaps you’re doing them for her.’

‘Of course I’m not doing her chores for her.’

‘You seem so awfully in thrall to her. And she has always struck me as such an ordinary young woman. You mustn’t let her monopolise you. Don’t go running around after her. Where are all your other friends? You never seem to see Margaret these days. And Mrs Barber has friends, surely? Friends of her own background?’

Was that what this was about, then? wondered Frances. Background? She almost hoped it was. She said, ‘I enjoy Lilian’s company, that’s all. She enjoys mine.’

‘More than her sisters’?’

‘You know very well that they’re rather different types.’

‘And her husband’s?’

‘I’ve told you before, they don’t always get along.’

‘Well, but don’t let her take advantage of you. When she patches things up with Mr Barber —’

‘Perhaps she won’t patch them up,’ Frances couldn’t help but say.

At that, her mother looked impatient. ‘But of course she will! She’ll make herself thoroughly unhappy if she doesn’t. No wife likes to think she hasn’t made a success of her marriage. I hope you haven’t been putting any odd notions on the subject into her head. If I thought – If I thought for one moment that you’d been encouraging her in turning away from her husband —’

Frances spoke without a blink. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’

And her manner must have been convincing. Her mother’s gaze lost some of its edge. ‘Well. Just don’t go making some sort of “cause” out of her. She and Mr Barber won’t live here for ever. There are sure to be children at some point. They’ll move back into their own sphere, and then – what? You’ll see less of her, and be sorry.’

‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Yes, I expect you’re right.’

She said it with an air of finality, hoping to put an end to the conversation – which had drawn, she thought, perilously close to the old upset over Christina.

Or, then again, she wondered as she returned to her mending, had it? Wasn’t it more like the conversations she could remember having with her mother in her teens, about the school-friends and the neighbours’ daughters over whom she’d regularly grown so embarrassingly romantic? ‘Gordon will think he has a rival,’ she recalled her mother saying once, with an awkward laugh, here in this very room. Gordon Fowler had been engaged to Mrs Playfair’s daughter Kate; Frances had rather idolised Kate when she was fourteen or so. Her mother must be imagining now that she had some sort of crush on Lilian. She was warning her – was she? Was she looking into the future, seeing disappointments, tears? She couldn’t guess, then, how dizzyingly far beyond a crush Frances and Lilian had already travelled. What would she think, what would she do, if she could picture them as they had been a few hours before, Frances sprawled on the sitting-room carpet, Lilian’s mouth between her legs?