The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged.

She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments – these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.

Was it whimsy? She hated whimsy. But it only became whimsy when she tried to put it into words.

There were no smart shops once she had crossed Oxford Circus. London made one of its costume changes, like whipping off a cloak; it became a shabby muddle of pianola sellers, Italian grocers, boarding-houses, pubs.

She had heard his voice, she’d said, as clearly as she had ever heard it in life: he had told her not to mourn, that mourning was wasteful, mourning would keep the world in darkness when what it needed was to progress into light.

She put a hand to her head, disarranging the curls of her hair. 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. Instead, she moved towards the stairs.

Mrs Barber laughed. The laughter was mixed with the smoke from her cigarette: it seemed to come visibly out of her pursed, plump mouth, and was so warm, so real, so unlike her usual automatic tittering, that Frances felt an odd thrill of triumph at having called it into life.

How well she filled her own skin! She might have been poured generously into it, like treacle.

It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.

But women’s friendships were like that, she reflected: a giddy-up, and off they cantered. If she occasionally lapsed into gallantry – well, there was something about Lilian that inspired gallantry, that was all. And if there were more of those moments, those little licks, almost of romance, they meant nothing; she was sure they meant nothing.

She had the sense that with her confession she had wrecked their friendship, thrown it away. And for what? For honesty. For principle. For the sake of a love-affair that in any case had already had the life pressed out of it, years before.

It was just as though, with a clash of its gears, their accelerated friendship had suddenly gone into reverse.

Next morning, out in the WC, she discovered that her ‘friend’ had arrived. Why it was called a friend she could never imagine – it was more like an enemy within the gates – but, anyhow, seeing the smear of scarlet on the square of Bromo made her, perversely, feel better.

Already, however, after just three mouthfuls, she could feel the gin inside her, quick and warm, like a friendly flame; the friendliest thing, it seemed to her, that she had encountered in ages.

Was this, she thought, what happened when one made friends with a married woman? One automatically got the husband too? – like a crochet pattern, coming free with a magazine?

She might have been a hollow vessel with the liquor inside her, its surface spreading as she approached the horizontal.

‘Mr Barber is a man, with a man’s constitution.’ ‘What a very Victorian thing to say.’

Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don’t you?’

‘No, there wasn’t a man. There never has been a man, for me. It seems I haven’t the – the man microbe, or whatever it is one needs.

But – could she be imagining it? She had the sense that Lilian was conscious of her.

‘I’m sure I won’t hate it, Lilian,’ said Frances. I won’t hate it, she meant, if I’m with you.

Frances hesitated. Then, ‘It’s your shine,’ she said. Lilian looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘He’s only taken a shine to me because I’ve taken a shine to you. It’s your shine, Lilian.’

‘I can’t let you go.’ It was like being parched, and touching water; like being famished, and holding food. ‘Please. Please. Just a little while longer. Just to kiss. I promise.’

Beyond was the thud, thud of her heart – Frances kissed every beat of it.

They kissed, until the back door banged. And then, ‘I love you!’ she whispered, squeezing Frances’s hand as she pulled away. She hadn’t said it before. ‘I love you!’ Their fingers tore, and she was gone.

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

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.

And when Christina asked archly, ‘So? How’s Love, upper case?’ she blew a raspberry at her.

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.

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.’

The tears shook her like a storm.

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?

Her mother had the handkerchief at her mouth. Her head was bowed, her eyes were tearless but tightly closed, and Frances, recognising the posture, knew that she was thinking now not so much of Leonard but of her own lost sons and grandsons – was slipping away into some bleak interior place peopled only by ghosts, by absences.

‘Do you love me?’ Lilian asked once, with a note of yearning in her voice, and the question was as jarring as if it had been asked by Vera or Min. Frances drew her close and kissed her; but she did it mainly to hide her own face.

And once again the moment had another moment inside it:

But if one closed one’s eyes, thought Frances. If one forgot the fumble and failure of a few minutes before. If one forgot the blood, the electric panic, the police, the newspapers. If one made one’s mind a blank. Then couldn’t it be how it used to be, the two of them together, warm and true? It’s the only real thing.

faces lit up when she appeared, like misers’ at the gleam of gold, then dimmed and turned away from her when they saw what a dud she was.

Ahead of her were the sooty criss-crossed girders of the neighbouring railway bridge. Below, the river was swollen, sullen; it had the lustreless colour of clay. Why not pitch herself into it? The parapet was low enough. Why not just chuck herself right over? Add one more casualty to the list? She leaned forward, feeling the tilt of her own weight, startlingly persuasive. But now she was being like a bad actress again.

But for now there was this, and it was enough, it was more than they could have hoped for: the two of them in their stone corner, their dark clothes bleeding into the dusk, lights being kindled across the city, and a few pale stars in the sky.