The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online Page A

lived on this last one, in two rooms on the top floor of an ugly, newish building. Frances went in by a brown-tiled passage, greeted the porter in his booth, passed on to the open courtyard and began the long climb up the stairs. As she approached Christina’s landing she could hear the sound of her typewriter, a fluid, hectic
tap-tap-tap
. She paused to catch her breath, put her finger to the push of the doorbell, and the typewriting ceased. A moment later Christina opened the door, tilting up her small, pale, pointed face for Frances’s kiss, but narrowing her eyes and blinking.
    ‘I can’t see you! I can only see letters, hopping about like fleas. Oh, I shall go blind, I know I shall. Just a minute, while I bathe my brow.’
    She slipped past Frances to wash her hands at the sink on the landing, and then to hold the hands to her forehead. She came back rubbing at an eye with a wet knuckle.
    The building was run by a society offering flats to working women. Christina’s neighbours were school-mistresses, stenographers, lady clerks; she herself made her living by typing up manuscripts and dissertations for authors and students, and by odd bits of secretarial and book-keeping work. Just now, she told Frances as she led her into the flat, she was helping out on a new little paper, a little political thing; she had been typing up statistics on the Russian Famine, and the constant fiddling about with the margins had given her a headache. Then, of course, there were the figures themselves, so many hundreds of thousands dead, so many hundreds of thousands still starving. It was miserable work.
    ‘And the worst of it is,’ she said guiltily, ‘it’s made me so hungry! And there isn’t a bit of food in the flat.’
    Frances opened her bag. ‘Hey presto – there is, now. I’ve made you a cake.’
    ‘Oh, Frances, you haven’t.’
    ‘Well, a currant loaf. I’ve been carrying it about with me, and it weighs a ton. Here you are.’
    She brought the loaf out, undid its string, parted its paper. Christina saw the glossy brown crust of it and her blue eyes widened like a child’s. There was only one thing to do with a cake like that, she said, and that was to toast it. She set a kettle on the gas-ring for tea, then rummaged about in a cupboard for an electric fire.
    ‘Sit down while this warms up,’ she said, as the fire began to tick and hum. ‘Oh, but let some air in, would you, so we don’t swelter.’
    Frances had to move a colander from the window-sill in order to raise the sash. The room was large and light, decorated in fashionable Bohemian colours, but there were untidy piles of books and papers on the floor, and nothing was where it ought to be. The armchairs were comedy-Victorian, one of scuffed red leather, the other of balding velveteen. The velveteen one had a tray balanced on it, bearing the remains of two breakfasts: sticky egg cups and dirty mugs. She passed the tray to Christina, who cleared it, gave it a wipe, set it with cups, saucers, plates and a smeary bottle of milk, and handed it back. The mugs, the egg cups, the cups and saucers, were all of pottery, heavily glazed, thickly made – all of it with a rather ‘primitive’ finish. Christina shared this flat with another woman, Stevie. Stevie was a teacher in the art department of a girls’ school in Camden Town, but was trying to make a name for herself as a maker of ceramics.
    Frances did not dislike Stevie exactly, but she generally timed her visits so that they fell inside school hours; it was Chrissy she came to see. The two of them had known each other since the mid-point of the War. With the coming of Peace, perversely, they had parted on bad terms, but fate had brought them back together – fate, or chance, or whatever it was that, one day last September, had sent Frances into the National Gallery to escape a torrent of rain, had nudged her out of the Flemish rooms and into the Italian, where she had come upon Christina, as sodden as