The Paying Guests(84)
The idea brought with it a rush of something startlingly like triumph; but the feeling immediately began to change, began to shrivel and grow dark. For what, Frances asked herself, had she and Lilian done? They had allowed this passion into the house: she saw it for the first time as something unruly, something almost with a life of its own. It might have been a fugitive that the two of them had smuggled in by night, then hidden away in the attic or in the spaces behind the walls.
Turning down the gas in the hall at bedtime, hearing the creak of Lilian’s ironing board in the little kitchen, she said to herself, I won’t go in to her. Just this once, I won’t go in. She climbed the stairs, meaning to go straight to her room and close the door. But as she left the final step she hesitated; and then, without another thought, she went softly around the stairwell to the open kitchen doorway. She and Lilian met each other’s gaze, and her heart turned over. She stole further into the room.
Lilian set the iron on its trivet and looked nervously past her to the landing. ‘I thought you were never going to come! I’ve been here ages, pressing the same pillow-case over and over. You don’t hate me, do you?’
‘Hate you?’
‘I thought, earlier on – Oh, I’ve been thinking all sorts of things.’
They touched hands across the board; then she caught up the iron again. The sitting-room door had opened and, with a whistle, here came Leonard.
He was dressed for the heat – or rather, undressed for it, with his feet bare, and his sleeves rolled high, and his collarless shirt flapping at the throat, giving a glimpse of the white vest beneath it and a suggestion of the gingery chest beneath that. The bruises around his eyes, which over the past four weeks had paled from bluish-black to khaki, had now all but faded; he seemed his old self, bouncing with health. He had a bottle of beer in his hand, and took a last swig from it as he entered the kitchen.
He greeted Frances quite cheerily, moving past her in a fox-trot. He seemed to have wandered in for no particular reason, and she hoped that he would now go wandering off again. Instead he lingered, nosing about, watching Lilian at work on the pillow-slip. ‘Are you going to be much longer at that?’
She answered self-consciously. ‘It has to be done.’
His tone became faintly wheedling. ‘Finish it tomorrow, can’t you?’
She slid the iron across the cloth and made no reply. But still he watched, still he hovered, still he mooched about. He didn’t look at Frances again. There was no hostility in his manner. He wanted his wife, that was all – she realised it with a pang. He didn’t know – how could he? – that she wanted her too.
The thought made her step away and go across to her own room. Opening the door, she found that Lilian had slipped one of her notes underneath: a heart, with an arrow piercing it. She stared at the scrap of paper then put it aside, face down.
By the time she had undressed, and got into bed, and smoked her cigarette, Lilian and Leonard had left the kitchen and one of them was shutting off the gas on the landing; a moment later there came the soft click of their closing bedroom door. Frances had heard that click every night for the past three months, but something about the sound, tonight, unsettled her. She shifted around, over-warm despite the open window, now and then lifting her head from her pillow, thinking that she could hear murmurs, creaks, laughter, from across the landing… There was nothing.
When she and Lilian saw each other the following morning they agreed that, in future, they would take more care. They would keep to Frances’s room, they said, where they could hear the garden door if it sounded, as well as the front one, and for a week they were very cautious, meeting only when the house was empty, and the rest of the time wringing a terrible excitement from chance encounters on the landing, catching at each other’s hands as they passed on the stairs. Frances went to her mother and said that she’d been thinking things over and, yes, she had been letting herself grow a little slack. Were there any charity tasks she could help with? What about those raffle tickets? There turned out to be five hundred of them: she spent an afternoon inking in the numbers, and then another afternoon going round the local houses, trying to cajole people into buying them. A part of her enjoyed it. Even the separation from Lilian: a part of her enjoyed that. She remembered the airless feeling she’d had in the gaudy sitting-room.
But at night, in the darkness, she’d find herself lifting her head, listening out for the sound of that closing bedroom door. And the next time she and Lilian made love there was some new quality to it. They stripped naked, but nakedness somehow wasn’t enough any more: she wanted to get past Lilian’s skin, possess her, with her hands, her lips, her tongue… Afterwards they lay breathless, shaken by the thud of their hearts, pressed together so tightly that she wasn’t sure which of the beats were Lilian’s, which her own. When she began to ease herself free, Lilian caught hold of her. ‘Don’t let go of me! Never let go!’
But once the thud had calmed and Lilian’s grip on her had slackened, her mood began to cloud. She thought of how she would lie here later, with only a ghost in her arms; how she would listen for that closing door. She had never asked what went on beyond it. She had never wanted to know. It had seemed something that didn’t concern her, something that scarcely concerned Lilian. Now, suddenly, not knowing was impossible to bear.
She drew a breath. ‘Lilian, when you’re with Leonard – Is it like this, with him?’