The Paying Guests

I barely knew I had skin before I met you.

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

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. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn't a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments.

I'm sorry you aren't as brave as you thought you were. But don't punish me because of it.

The rest of us become narrow and mean when we live falsely. I'm sick to death of living falsely. I've been doing it for years.

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

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?

They made her feel lonelier, suddenly, than she had ever felt before. She went creeping into her room and undressed without lighting a candle, then lay curled in bed in a ferment of misery. What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile . . .

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.

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

Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.

Sometimes the shortest journeys take longest, don’t they?

She said, 'It's real, isn't it?' Lilian answered after a pause, with a bowed head, in a murmur. 'Yes, it's real. It's the only real thing.

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.

Don’t you like surprises?’ No, Frances didn’t like surprises. She hated the thought of people plotting and planning on her behalf. She loathed the burden of being delighted once the surprise was disclosed.

As far as Frances was concerned, gardening was simply open-air housework.

... she had seemed to be quivering, to be ringing, like a wine glass that had just been struck.

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?

you said I like to be admired, do you remember? You said I would love anybody who admired me. Dont hate this hard thing I am about to say my darling but sometimes I think its you that would love anybody. Sometimes it seems so astonishing that you should love me that I think you must only want me because you lost so many other things. It isnt just that, is it?

They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.

It looks like the house of Ali Baba! Or the Moulin Rouge! Or the Taj Mahal! If only she would decide on a country and have done with it. Is that what passes for modern décor?

Now the world seemed to her to have become so complex that its problems defied solution. There was only a chaos of conflicts of interest; the whole thing filled her with a sense of futility.

If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they’d never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist’s, were the truest things in it.

We can't go on like this. Look at you! It's killing you! And I--I can't do it any longer, not the way we've been doing it till now... I can't share you with something that passes itself off as a marriage, but is really habit and pride and ... empty embraces, or worse. If I loved you less, I might be able to, but--I can't. I won't.

There had been romances in my schooldays--but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect's eyes... This wasn't like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up.

You don’t think about all these colours when everything’s going all right; you’d go mad if you did. You just think about the colour on the top. But those colours are there, all the same. All the quarrels, and the bits of unkindness. And every so often something happens to put a chip right through; and then you can’t not think of them.’ She looked up, and grew self-conscious;

And, worst of all, she was trapped with their marriage, their mystifying union, which had evidently passed out of whatever affectionate phase it had recently enjoyed and was already mired in some new quarrel . . . She didn’t care about the details.

And that was all it took. They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them. There was a quickening, a livening- Frances could think of nothing to compare it to save some culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, a milk sauce thickening in the pan. It was as subtle yet as tangible as that.

...She worked briskly and efficiently, taking her brush and pan from the drawing-room to the top of the stairs and making her way back down, a step at a time; after that she filled a bucket with water, fetched her kneeling-mat, and began to wash the hall floor. Vinegar was all she used. Soap left streaks on the black tiles. The first, wet rub was important for loosening the dirt, but it was the second bit that really counted, passing the wrung cloth over the floor in one supple, unbroken movement... There! How pleasing each glossy tile was. The gloss would fade in about five minutes as the surface dried; but everything faded. The vital thing was to make the most of the moments of brightness. There was no point dwelling on the scuffs.

What did she want? Frances couldn't tell. She wasn't sure she cared any more. There had been too much dancing back and forth. The night had been over-stretched: it had lost its tension.