But across the moment there came, from out in the hall, the clanging of a bell, followed almost instantly by footsteps in the passage; and at that, Lilian’s gaze slid fearfully past Frances to the door. Frances turned to see the shadow of a figure against its ground-glass panel. It was one of the Old Bailey officials, come to tap, and to call discreetly. Was Mrs Barber inside? Did she wish to hear the verdict? Word had just come that the jury were on their way back to the court.
They faced each other again. Lilian had wiped her tears away. Frances could barely get the words out.
‘Here it is, then.’
And now, after the torpor of the wait, there was suddenly a horrible speed to it all – or, not a speed exactly, not a haste, but a remorseless forward movement, like the drop of a china cup towards a stone floor. With a shaking hand, Lilian lowered her veil. They returned to the hall and found it deserted. They had to hurry into the courtroom like tardy theatre-goers, had to push their way to their places – for the room was crowded to bursting-point now. Men must have come from other courts – come, as it were, for the finale – clerks and officials, reporters, policemen: they were standing against the walls, had fitted themselves into every corner. Up in the gallery, people were squashed together and seemed still to be piling in. She and Lilian sat – then almost at once had to stand again, as the door beside the dais was opened to admit the judge.
And as he came forward into the sudden electric hush, Frances saw that he had something in his hand – not the absurd little posy this time, but a dreadful limp black thing – a thing, she thought with a burst of horror, that oughtn’t to be allowed to exist – it was the cap that he would place over his wig if he had to pass sentence. He carried it without a qualm. He moved in an ordinary way, took his seat at an ordinary pace; unflustered, too, were the robed and gold-chained men who came with him, whose identity and function she had never been able to fathom. Then the jury filed in, still avoiding the boy’s eye – he had been kept on his feet in the dock, was passing his cuff across his sweating top lip. Frances watched them settle themselves. She watched the chief clerk approach them. This couldn’t be the moment, could it? It was all too smooth and unconsidered. A life was at stake. It couldn’t be now. It was all too quick!
But the foreman was making himself known, was rising – it was not the shopkeeper after all, but a slim, colourless man to whom she had paid no attention. She felt a movement against her wrist, and looked down to see Lilian’s hand feeling for hers. She caught hold of it; their fingers met, and slid into a clasp. There was a moment of dreadful suspense while some last detail was taken care of. Then:
‘Members of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdict?’
The colourless man nodded, and answered in a colourless voice. ‘We have.’
‘Do you find the prisoner, William Spencer Ward, guilty or not guilty of the murder of Leonard Arthur Barber?’
‘We find him not guilty.’
Christ! Had Frances cried out? She might as well have. Other people had cried out too, in disbelief and excitement, though somewhere in the gallery a strange, lone cheer had gone up, to be almost instantly stifled. Lilian was leaning forward, her face hidden, her shoulders heaving; she had burst into tears. Douglas was up on his feet. The boy in the dock was looking about as if uncertain of what he’d heard. Reporters were rushing from the room and a voice was calling for order.
Not guilty! What was happening now? Frances couldn’t take it in. The judge spoke; she didn’t hear him. He must have been discharging the prisoner, for the next time she looked at Spencer all she saw was his dipped, youthful head disappearing down the stairs in the dock. Not guilty! It couldn’t be real! That blade was back in her heart. Lilian was still crying. The jurymen had been dismissed and now the judge was leaving the chamber; the courtroom was coming apart at the seams, everyone moving from their places, chairs scraping, a hubbub of voices. She rose, and felt herself sway. Lilian got to her feet beside her; she had put back her veil, was wiping her face. Ought they to go? Ought they to stay? They had no plan, suddenly. The Barber men were elbowing their way down into the well of the court. She and Lilian stumbled after them, but the whole thing was like a dream, it seemed to rush at her and then to break into fragments, Spencer’s mother and uncle being hustled from the room, Billie smiling, revealing dimples, as she spoke with a reporter, the barristers shaking hands with each other like clubmen after a wager, the solicitor coming to apologise, misinterpreting Lilian’s tears: ‘A bad conclusion, Mrs Barber. These slips do happen, I’m afraid.’ Inspector Kemp and Sergeant Heath had faces lumpy with disgust. ‘Oh, he was our lad all right,’ the inspector was telling Leonard’s father. ‘We lost him to the squeamishness of the jury. But we’ll get him for something else before too long, don’t you worry.’ And there was Douglas, darting about – Douglas seeming to be everywhere at once – grabbing at people, calling in Leonard’s voice, with Leonard’s furious face and wet, red lips: ‘This is a joke! How is this justice? What the hell were the jury thinking? This won’t stop here! Bring those men back! I want the judge!’
And somehow, somehow, though she and Lilian had been together when they had left their bench, by the time Frances had fought her way across the courtroom she was alone. She stood close to the door and peered back into the crowd. She spotted the widow’s hat, the coat: Lilian had been stopped by Mr Ives, who had her hands in his; he was like the solicitor, grave and apologetic. Now Douglas had joined them. He had got hold of a newspaper man… Frances tucked herself, as best she could, out of the flow of people. She watched the crowd leaving the gallery. She watched a clerk going from desk to desk on the dais, gathering papers.
And it was only then, seeing him make his tidy bundle of ink-stained documents, that she began to believe it. The burden had gone, and had left her light. She felt that, without any trouble at all – a flex of the toes, a jolt from an elbow – she might start floating from the floor. But the feeling had something wrong about it. The lightness was the lightness of ash. She was scorched, dried out. She couldn’t even kneel and thank God. For God, she was sure, had had nothing to do with it. There was nothing and no one to thank, here at the very end of it all, just as there’d been nothing and no one to blame for the accident at the very beginning. Or – no, there was that man, that Bermondsey neighbour. What was his name? She’d forgotten it already. But he was the one who had saved them – saved the boy, and Lilian, and her. The jury had persuaded themselves that he was decent, because they had wanted to think that in his shoes they would have been decent too. They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.
She remembered Lilian reaching for her hand as the foreman got to his feet. In the seconds before the verdict, her own grip had tightened like a vice. Had she been about to urge Lilian forward, or to hold her back?
She didn’t know. She would never know. And the not knowing wasn’t like the absence of something, it was like another burden, a different shape and weight from the last. The lightness left her. She wanted to get out. She looked for Lilian again. But when their gazes finally met it was only for an instant; and then it seemed to her that she saw Lilian turn away.
She saw it almost without surprise. The thing was finished now, wasn’t it?
She turned, and pushed free of the courtroom. The hall was thick with people, but no one watched her as she made her way across to the staircase and down. Even out on the street, though a crowd had gathered to hear the verdict and see the boy, she got through it easily enough: 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. The light was a flat grey twilight. It must be some time after four. She left the massive building behind and followed the downward slope of the streets towards the river.
She said to herself, as she plodded: You are safe, you are safe. They were all safe now, she supposed: she, Lilian, the boy. For, having once been cleared of the murder he co
uldn’t be re-arrested for it, and if the police truly believed him guilty then the case, perhaps, would languish… Or perhaps it wouldn’t. She had no idea. She could still see Spencer in the dock, wiping the sweat from his top lip. You are safe, you are safe… But, no, she thought, this wasn’t safety – or, if it was, then it was the kind of safety that came after a war, the kind of safety she had always despised, because it was got by doing harm. So much harm! She felt sick to think of it. Leonard, Leonard’s parents, Spencer, his mother, Billie, Charlie: the list of casualties seemed endless. They seemed to be trudging along with her. There was the miscarried baby, too…
She had got on to Blackfriars Bridge now. She had been walking like a blind woman all this time, moving by every sense save sight. But then, which way could she go, except this way? And what was her future but a dark one? She pictured the house on Champion Hill. She pictured herself stepping into the porch, opening the door, passing through it. She saw the door closing behind her and sealing her in.
At that, like a clockwork figure running down, she slowed to a standstill. She was on the high mid-point of the bridge, had barely travelled half a mile; glancing back over her shoulder, she could still see the black dome of the Old Bailey, the golden figure on the top. One or two people looked curiously at her as she stood there in the middle of the pavement, so she moved to the parapet, put her back to the traffic and the passers-by. 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. She straightened up and looked around. At regular points across the bridge the parapet became a sort of alcove, with a shallow stone seat inside it; she went gratefully into the nearest of these, and sat.
At once, she felt that she would never be able to get up again. There seemed nothing to get up for. She was out of the breeze here, out of the chill, tucked away in the deepening twilight. A bus went by, a score of faces staring blankly into hers: she simply closed her eyes against them. The roar of the motor gave way to another, and to another after that. Minute by minute, layer upon layer, the sounds came and were withdrawn: hooves, voices, hurrying steps, the clash and grind of iron wheels. She could feel it all in the stone on which she was resting. It felt like the tired turn of the world.
And when she opened her eyes again, Lilian was there.
How long had she been standing there? Not long at all perhaps, because she was breathless, as if she’d been running. Her head was bare, her hair untidy; she had her widow’s hat in her hand, the veil of it fluttering. She said, in a disbelieving way, ‘I saw you from the taxi. I came looking for you, and I found you. Why didn’t you wait for me? Why did you go?’
Frances was staring at her as if she might be a figure in a dream. ‘I thought you wouldn’t want to look at me.’
‘How could you think that?’
‘Because —’ She lowered her head. ‘Because I’m not sure that I can bear to look at myself.’
Lilian stood still for a moment, then came into the alcove and sat down at her side.
After a silence, she spoke wearily. ‘I wish there was something I could say to you, Frances, to make it all right.’ She passed a gloved hand over her face. Her hands were slim as a mannequin’s now, and her cheeks had hollows in them; all her treacly loveliness had faded. She sighed, and let the hand drop. ‘But he will always be dead. He will always, always be dead. And I will always have killed him. And all the time I’ve been at Walworth I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, trying to see what I could have done differently – where I could have stopped it, where I could have kept it from becoming what it became. But every time, it seemed to me that the only thing I could have done differently was never to have kissed you, that night, after the party… And even now, after everything, I can’t wish that. You made me want to, for a while, but – I can’t. I can’t.’
I can’t. They were a queer two words by which to be reunited: a statement of failure, Frances thought, as much as of love. But they were like the two words that the jury had brought back: the moment she heard them she began to shake, to imagine if they had not been said.
Lilian saw, and put a hand over hers; and presently the tremble passed away. They didn’t try to speak again. They leaned together by an inch – that was all it took, after all, to close the space between them. Would it be all right, wondered Frances, if they were to allow themselves to be happy? Wouldn’t it be a sort of insult to all those others who had been harmed? Or oughtn’t they to do all they could – didn’t they almost have a duty – to make one small brave thing happen at last?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t think of it. Her mind wouldn’t reach that far. It wouldn’t reach further than Lilian’s hand and shoulder and hip, warm against hers. They’d have to rise soon, she supposed. A boy was calling the evening edition. At home, her mother would be waiting. Lilian’s family were waiting too. 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.
Author’s Note
Many books helped to inform and inspire this one. I am particularly indebted to the following: Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford, 2001), Billie Melman’s Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke, 1988), Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (London, 1933) and Chronicle of Youth: War Diary 1913–1917 (London, 1981), Carol Acton’s Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse (Basingstoke, 2007), Patricia Jalland’s Death in War and Peace: A History of Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970 (Oxford, 2010), Lucy Bland’s Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester, 2013), Winifred Duke’s Trial of Harold Greenwood (Edinburgh and London, 1930), F. Tennyson Jesse’s Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner (London and Edinburgh, 1935) and A Pin to See the Peepshow (London, 1934), David Napley’s Murder at the Villa Madeira: The Rattenbury Case (London, 1988), Filson Young’s Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson (Edinburgh and London, 1923) and René Weis’s Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson (London, 1988). As these titles perhaps reveal, this novel had as its starting-point my interest in some of the high-profile British murder cases of the twenties and thirties. The Paying Guests, however, is a work of fiction.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my wonderful editors in the UK, the US and Canada: Lennie Goodings, Megan Lynch and Lara Hinchberger. Thanks to everyone at Greene & Heaton, and to Jean Naggar, Jennifer Weltz and Dean Cooke. Thanks to the staff at the Southwark Local History Library, the Lambeth Archives, the London Library, the Cinema Museum and the London Jamyang Buddhist Centre (formerly the Lambeth Police Court); to my insightful early readers Susan de Soissons, Antony Topping, Christie Hickman, Ursula Doyle and Kendra Ward; and to the following people for expertise and/or moral support: Laura Doan, James Tayler, Alison Oram, Jackie Malton, Val McDermid, Professor Sue Black, Zoë Gullen, Fiona Leach, Julia Parry and Kate Taylor. Special thanks to Sally O-J, whose enthusiasm for this novel helped keep it afloat in choppy waters. Above all: thank you Lucy, for your wisdom, your patience and your love.
Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests
(Series: # )
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