Free The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters Page B

wanting to have to encounter him for a third time that night. But in any case, he didn’t appear. She was up in her room, groping for the pins in her hair, before she heard the back door closed and bolted.
    She listened to his step on the stairs with a lingering crossness – but found herself curious, too, as to how he would greet his wife. She thought of Christina asking her if she had put a tumbler to the wall. But it wasn’t eavesdropping, was it, if one simply stole closer to the door and tilted one’s head?
    She heard Mrs Barber’s voice first. ‘There you are! I thought you’d got lost. What have you been doing?’
    He answered with a yawn. ‘Nothing.’
    ‘You must have been doing something.’
    ‘Having a smoke, out the back. Looking at the stars.’
    ‘The stars? Did you see your future in them?’
    ‘Oh, I know that already, don’t I?’
    That was all they said. But the
way
in which they said it – the absolute deadness of their tones, the absence of anything like affection – took Frances aback. It had never occurred to her that their marriage might be anything other than happy. Now, astonished, she thought, Why, they might almost hate each other!
    Well, their feelings were their own affair, she supposed. So long as they paid their rent… But that was thinking like a landlady; that was a horrible way to think. She didn’t want them to be miserable. But she felt unnerved, too. She was reminded of how little she knew them. And here they were, at the heart of her house! Her mind ran back, unwillingly, to Stevie’s warning about the ‘clerk class’.
    She wished now that she hadn’t listened. She crept into bed and blew out her candle, but lay wakeful, open-eyed. She heard the couple moving about between their sitting-room and kitchen, and soon one of them paused on the landing – Mr Barber, yawning again. She watched the shrinking away of the light from under her door as he turned down the gas.

3
    Her sense of disquiet passed with the night. When the couple rose in the morning they sounded ordinary, even cheerful. Mr Barber was humming as he shaved at the sink. Before he left for his half-Saturday at the office he said something in a low tone to his wife, and she answered him with laughter.
    An hour or so later, Frances left the house herself: she went to the florist’s to fetch the wreath for her father’s grave. And as soon as she and her mother had had their lunch, they set off for the cemetery.
    The weather had dulled overnight, and they had dressed for it, and for the occasion, in their soberest coats and hats. But it was May, after all: they grew warm on the journey to West Norwood, and warmer still as they made the long uphill walk to her father’s plot. By the time they arrived at it, Frances was sweating. She took off her gloves, considered removing her hat – had got as far as drawing out its pin before she caught her mother’s disapproving eye.
    ‘Father wouldn’t mind, would he? He hated being too warm himself, remember?’
    ‘Father always knew when to keep a hat on, however warm he was.’
    Frances thrust the pin back in, turning away. ‘I’ll bet he’s warm just now.’
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘I said, “I’ll get some water now.”’
    ‘Oh.’ Her mother looked wary. ‘Yes, do.’
    They unpacked their tools, their cemetery kit: the trowel, the rake, the brush, the bottle, the bar of Monkey Brand. Her mother got to work on the weeds and the moss while Frances went to the tap. She returned to the grave to wet the brush and draw it across the soap, and then to start scrubbing at her father’s headstone.
    The stone was plain, solid, handsome –
expensive
, she thought, on every visit, with resentment; for, of course, the funeral arrangements had all been made in the first bewildering days after her father’s death, before she and her mother had had a chance to discover just how stupendously he had managed to mishandle the family funds. J OHN F RYER W RAY , the