The Paying Guests(99)
‘I was frightened that it had,’ said Frances.
‘Well, you don’t sound very happy that it hasn’t.’
‘No. I —’
But what could she say? She was ashamed, she realised. She longed to speak, to unburden herself; she remembered the bond she had felt with Christina at the music hall. She could find no trace of it now. There was merely the old scratchiness – that bit of cinder in the soap. So they talked of stupid, pointless things. She stayed for less than twenty minutes, and wished she hadn’t come at all.
But before she left she looked around the room, that was so full of Christina and Stevie. She and Lilian would have a room like it, once this horrible thing was done.
And when, half an hour later, seated on a bench in Cavendish Square, she spotted Lilian herself, hurrying across the garden towards her, she felt a jolt of uncomplicated love in her heart, simply at seeing her, there, among strangers. She looked flushed, damp, pleased. She joined Frances beneath the umbrella and spoke breathlessly.
‘I thought I’d never get here in time! The shop turned out not to be right after all. The man sent me to another, on the Charing Cross Road. He was awful about it. He acted as though I was on the streets or something. I kept my gloves off, to show my ring; he made me feel it had come off a curtain! But it doesn’t matter. The second man was all right. And I got them. Look.’
She began to unclasp her bag. Frances glanced around in alarm. But the light was poor, people were hurrying because of the rain, vehicles were loud on the wet roads: it felt oddly intimate under the silk of the umbrella. Lilian opened the bag just enough to reveal the buff-coloured packet inside it. Frances saw a poorly printed label: Dr Ridley’s Pills, for the Treatment of Female Irregularities.
She could hardly believe that such a thing was for sale in a West-End chemist’s, in 1922. It looked like something that belonged in a museum of medical curiosities alongside a two-headed baby and a leech jar. The pills themselves, she discovered when Lilian discreetly exposed them, were hard and fibrous, and smelt pungent, like a bad sort of mint. ‘But they have to make them nasty,’ reasoned Lilian, ‘don’t they? Otherwise nobody’d believe that they do any good.’
All in the cover of her open handbag, she tipped one of the pills into her gloved palm and gazed at it with distaste. Then she made to lift it to her lips.
Frances, aghast, caught hold of her wrist. ‘You aren’t going to take one right now?’
She said, ‘I have to. You have to take some for three days, then all the rest on the fourth.’
‘No, don’t do it here. Not here, not yet.’
It was altogether too real, there, with a tooting taxi-cab going by, and ordinary red and white motor-buses snorting their way up and down Oxford Street.
But Lilian still had the pill in her palm. ‘I have to, Frances,’ she said again. And while Frances watched, she tightened her lips and sucked in her cheeks, working up the saliva in her mouth; then she popped the evil-looking pill on to her tongue and, with a grimace, quickly swallowed.
Frances kept her eyes on her face. ‘How do you feel?’
She took a breath. ‘I feel better for having started. But nothing will happen for ages yet.’ She folded the buff packet and tucked it deep down in her bag. ‘I’ll take another one before I go to bed tonight, and another when I get up; and if we’re lucky, maybe something will happen tomorrow.’
She said the same thing the next morning, and all through the whole of that day. She remained confident, calm; it was Frances who was anxious, scrutinising her face whenever the two of them were together, looking for signs of illness in it, and, when they had to be apart, hovering at the foot of the stairs, listening out for anything odd. ‘How funny you are,’ Lilian said. ‘You’re worse than a man. If you were a wife, you’d know it was nothing. How do you think other women do it?’
‘I don’t care about other women. I care only about you. Suppose you should faint, or —’
‘I won’t faint. I didn’t last time. Just be patient.’
That was on the Wednesday evening, before Leonard returned from work. And the following morning she came to Frances looking pale but excited. Something was happening, she said. She had an ache, low down in her hips. Her bowels were looser than they ought to be, and, in wiping herself in the lavatory, she’d discovered a ‘show’. The only worry now was that it might come out too soon, in which case Leonard might be home when it happened, and she’d have to explain it to him as either a heavy kind of ordinary monthly, or an actual miss… Frances held her hands and kissed her; at the same time, she was shrinking away. She couldn’t believe that in the space of a day or two her life had taken such a swerve, undergone such a narrowing, become this morbid stalking of Lilian’s insides, this monitoring of blood and bowels.
But by late afternoon, Lilian’s manner was less sure. The ‘show’ had dried up, the ache had diminished, and she had begun to feel queasy. In the middle of chopping meat for Len’s dinner she’d had to rush to the sink and retch; she couldn’t remember that from last time. She wanted to try a hot bath. But the bath would have to be almost scalding, she said, to do any good, and Frances’s mother was at home; they dared not risk being seen heating up kettles of water. They sat together in her sitting-room and she fidgeted, her hand at her stomach.