The Paying Guests(93)
She boarded the train without looking back. Probably it didn’t occur to her that Frances would stand and watch. But Frances remained there while the train moved off, and stayed even for a minute or two afterwards, thinking, Settling into my role! The words had filled her with horror. She had taken on the role herself; she had given up Christina to do it. But that was an age, a lifetime, ago, and since then – She stared at the shining railway line and thought of the night of Netta’s party, when she and Lilian had sat squashed together in the train. She remembered their silent climb up these steps, and all that had come after. There had been no roles to follow, then. The two of them had been reborn in each other’s kisses – hadn’t they?
She didn’t know. She’d lost her confidence in it. It all felt oddly insubstantial, as though Edith’s visit had chased it away, like a cockerel crowing away a ghost. She left the station and headed home, but the thought of the house, the tired house, the empty rooms, her grieving mother, made her falter. Instead of pressing on up the hill she crossed the road and went into the park.
She was suddenly desperate to conjure up Lilian’s presence, the substance and reality of her. But the fine weather had brought people out: the band-stand had a courting couple on it, the boy tickling the girl’s nose with a blade of grass; Frances didn’t even think of climbing the steps. She went on instead to the tennis courts, where she and Lilian had once stood to watch the young women play. A few games were in progress, but the nets were sagging, the courts worn to dust by the demands of the long summer. She approached the pond, and found the water dark, with scummy banks; she left it quickly. But everywhere was the same. It was all small, suburban, unspecial. The exposed western slope was like a desert plain. What struck her most were those remnants of the grand houses and gardens from which the park had been patched together years before: the stranded portico; a sundial, still telling the time for a lost age; a mournful avenue of trees, leading nowhere.
Frustrated, she kept moving. She thought she had come in here to find Lilian, but she realised as she made the turn from one path to another that she was not so much in search of something as in flight: she was trying to outrun the implications of Edith’s visit. She kept seeing Edith’s ring. She kept recalling the wink of the diamond. ‘Here I am, Miss Wray,’ that diamond seemed to say to her. ‘The real thing. You can’t compete with the likes of me, so don’t try. Be content with your “role”, that you are settling so nicely into, like an oyster digging its dumb way into the sea-bed.’ She had resisted thinking like this for the whole of her adult life. She would as soon have worn a ring like Edith’s as worn a saddle on her back! But she felt drained of strength and spirit; she felt bruised, she felt alone. Was this what the affair with Lilian had done to her? Made her a stranger to herself? With dragging feet, she left the last stretch of arid grass and started for home.
And as she approached the house, she spotted the postman just ahead of her. She arrived at the garden gate as he did; he offered her a letter, and when she took it, and saw her own name, written in Lilian’s curling hand, she felt not grateful, not relieved – she felt unnerved, as if she had called the letter into life by some dark magic. The envelope was almost weightless. She didn’t want to open it. She held it in her fingers, watching the retreating figure of the postman, and had the urge to run after him and stuff it back into his bag.
Instead she folded it into her pocket and went indoors. She found her mother just emerging from her bedroom, her face with a newly powdered look; and since her mother wore powder so rarely, she guessed that she had been weeping. The thought was like a final blow to her spirits. She wanted to sit at the foot of the staircase with her head in her hands. ‘Oh, Mother,’ she wanted to say, ‘our hearts are breaking. What on earth are we to do?’
But she hadn’t spoken candidly like that to her mother in about twenty years. Even after her brothers’ deaths, the two of them had done their crying in private. So, with the points of the folded letter digging into her through her pocket, she stood at the looking-glass to take off her hat. And when she spoke, she made her tone breezy. ‘Well! Edith marrying a jam-jar millionaire! Who ever would have thought it?’ – which allowed her mother to answer, in a gently chiding way, ‘Really, Frances.’
‘Oh, I’m thrilled for her. I just can’t help but feel that Mr Pacey is somehow getting the better half of the bargain. He must be ancient, too. And what a whopper of a ring! Perhaps there was a chip left over at the glass-works, what do you think?’
The little bit of shared snobbery was just sufficient. She caught her mother’s eye in the glass and they exchanged a tremulous smile.
But once her mother had returned to the drawing-room she watched her own smile fade. She turned away from it, climbed the stairs, went into her bedroom, closed the door. The letter looked more insubstantial than ever now that it had got creased from her pocket; more sinister, too. It still seemed to have been conjured into life as an answer to the failings of the day. The trudge around the park had brought it, the loss of confidence. She had finally admitted her own unhappiness, and that had allowed Lilian to admit hers. And between them they had made this thing, this flimsy, horrible thing, that – she knew, knew, knew it – was about to finish what the holiday had started, was going to separate them absolutely, like a contract of law.
With a burst of bravado, she thought: Well, perhaps it’s for the best.