The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

the thought brought on a flutter of panic. What on earth had she done? She felt as though she was opening up the house to thieves and invaders.

It’s a house with a history, isn’t it? Things – well, they oughtn’t always to be modern. There’d be no character if they were.’

It’s a house with a history, isn’t it? Things – well, they oughtn’t always to be modern. There’d be no character if they were.’

She walked to Buckingham Palace after that, not from any sentimental feeling about the King and Queen – whom, on the whole, she considered to be a pair of inbred leeches

She never came here without looking at the disorder of it all in a mixture of envy and despair, imagining the cool, calm, ordered place the rooms would be if they were hers.

‘And the wife?’ ‘Oh, much better than him. Good-looking, in the fleshy sort of way that men admire.

But Frances was struck, as she always was, by the dash of her, the queer panache, the air she had of not caring if the world admired her or thought her an oddity.

smiled in that pitying, knowing way in which married women often smiled,

She still had crumbs in the panel of her gown: Frances felt a housewifely urge – a housespinsterly urge, she supposed it ought to be called, in her case – to brush them free.

But then, men never do want women to do the things they want to do themselves, have you noticed?’

She thought suddenly, I’m like one of those men one hears whispers about, who bend themselves over the knees of women in shady rooms off Piccadilly and ask to be thrashed.

‘Another woman,’ said Frances, flatly. ‘I’d like to be able to say it was terribly pure and innocent, and all that. It – well, it wasn’t.’

‘We get along all right, really.’ ‘You never seem to, to me.’ ‘That’s just what husbands and wives are like.

If I was her husband, I’d smack her behind… How about you?’ ‘Yes, I’d smack it too.’

She set it down to steady herself against Frances’s embrace, and there was the muted tap of her wedding-band, a small, chill sound in the darkness.

She heard Leonard yawning again. Oh, go away, she begged him silently as the yawn extended itself into another yodel. Go away! Go anywhere! For ten minutes! For five! She felt no trace of guilt at thinking it, just as she had felt none the night before while making love to his wife.

You don’t want to be a man, do you? I wouldn’t love you if you were.

I know it’s an awful thing to say, but sometimes I wish some nice fat bus would just run him over.

it just seemed too hard & unfair that there isnt a way for us to be together when any man may blow a kiss at any girl at any window & people will smile at him for a good sport.

‘You don’t want to stay in me. I’d be a bad, bad mother. Fly away to someone else. Fly away to some poor woman who wants a baby and can’t have one.

He’d become not a man, but something resembling a man, something bulky and empty and wrong.