The Paying Guests(89)

‘I can’t love you and not ask you. You must see that.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘I can’t be without you.’

That sag came back into Lilian’s face. ‘Don’t, Frances! I love you so badly. But we’re different. You know we are. You don’t care what people think of you. It’s one of the things that made me love you, a thing I liked about you from the beginning, right from the moment I saw you cleaning the floor with that stupid duster on your head. But I’m not like that. I’m not like you. I’d have to give everything up. I shan’t ever love another girl, but you – you’d grow tired of me. I’ve expected you to grow tired of me every day since Netta’s party.’

‘But I haven’t. I couldn’t.’

‘You will, though. You might. Len’s tired of me, but that doesn’t matter. That’s just what happens between husbands and wives. But if you were to tire of me, and leave me, after I’d left him – what would I do?’

Frances shook her head. ‘How could I ever leave you, Lilian?’

Lilian looked back at her, unhappily. ‘But you left your other friend.’

The words caught Frances off guard, and she found herself unable to answer.

They stood in silence for a minute. Frances stared at the park without seeing it. ‘Can’t we just,’ said Lilian at last, ‘go on the way we’ve been doing? Something might change, or —’

‘What will change, if we don’t change it ourselves?’

‘I – I don’t know.’

‘And meanwhile, what? I must keep sharing you with Leonard?’

‘It isn’t like that.’

‘It feels like that. It feels worse than that! He doesn’t even know he’s sharing you.’

‘But it means nothing, my being with him. That’s the stupidest thing. He might as well be dead. Sometimes I wish he was. I know it’s an awful thing to say, but sometimes I wish some nice fat bus would just run him over. I wish – Oh, it isn’t fair! If we could only close our eyes, and open them and have everything be different!’

She did close her eyes as she spoke, as if she were wishing. But just what, wondered Frances, was she wishing for? She had lost sight of where the heart of the difficulty lay. Was it in the fact that they were both women? Or that Lilian was married? The two things seemed hopelessly entangled. She could get one of them smooth in her mind, but the other remained twisted. That came free and the first was in knots again. There had to be something, she thought – a word, a phrase, a key to it all – but she couldn’t find it, she couldn’t see it.

And before they could speak again there were sounds of giggling on the other side of the band-stand: two small boys were down on the gravel, peering in. They must have sensed the sad intensity of Frances and Lilian’s conversation, or perhaps seen something in their poses, for, ‘Spoony!’ one of them called. They raced off, screaming with laughter.

The word made Lilian jump. She pushed away from the rail. ‘God! Let’s go down, can we? The whole world can see us up here.’

‘No one’s looking. They were only schoolboys.’

‘I don’t like it. Let’s just go down.’

So they went back down the steps and picked their way along one of the paths. Nothing had changed, Frances thought. Nothing had been resolved or decided. She wanted to say again: What are we to do? But how many times could she keep asking it? Even to her own ears, the words were beginning to sound like a whine. So she said nothing. They moved on, with unlinked arms. There was nowhere to go save back to the house.

And there was no opportunity, after that, to be alone together. Leonard came home early for once, and seemed to spend the evening on the landing: every time Frances ventured upstairs she came face to face with him, fiddling about with his tennis racket, dabbing blanco on his shoes. She saw Lilian only in glimpses, over his shoulder. They didn’t kiss, they didn’t embrace; next morning they didn’t even say a proper goodbye. Mr Wismuth and Betty arrived at the same time as the butcher’s boy, and by the time Frances had taken the meat and sorted out some quibble with the order, Lilian and Leonard’s bags and cases, and then Lilian and Leonard themselves, had been squeezed into Charlie’s narrow motor-car and driven away.





9





And in some ways – oh, it was a relief to be rid of them. The whole furtive business of being with Lilian, of finding and securing and making the most of scraps of time with her – those juicy but elusive morsels of time, that had to be eased like winkles out of their shells, then gobbled down with an eye on the door, an ear to the stair, never comfortably savoured – it had all, Frances realised, been crushing the life out of her. She spent the two or three hours of that Saturday morning going between the kitchen and the drawing-room in a sort of trance. After lunch she lay on the sofa with the paper, shut her eyes against the latest bit of bad news, and actually slept.

She was still yawning at bedtime. With no closing door to listen for she passed an unfidgety night, and the next day, the Sunday, while her mother was at church, she ran herself a bath, then wandered about the house barefoot, smoking a cigarette. She was ashamed, as she did it, to discover how badly she had let things slip: all she could see were grubby corners, dusty plasterwork, finger-marks, smears. She fetched a pencil and a piece of paper and drew up a list of tasks.