The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

that’s all.’
    ‘Do you put a tumbler to the wall?’
    ‘Of course I don’t.’
    ‘I would. I’m glued to the floor every time the girl downstairs sneaks in her gentleman friend. It’s as good as a Marie Stopes lecture. If I had your Mr and Mrs – What are their names?’
    ‘Barber. Leonard and Lilian. Len and Lil, they call each other.’
    ‘Len and Lil, from Peckham Rye!’
    ‘They have to be from somewhere, you know.’
    ‘If I had them in the next room I wouldn’t get an ounce of work done.’
    ‘The novelty soon wears off, I assure you.’
    ‘Well, you don’t paint much of a picture… How’s the husband?’
    Frances recalled his unsettling blue gaze. ‘I’m not sure. I haven’t quite got his measure. Pleased with himself. A cock among hens.’
    ‘And the wife?’
    ‘Oh, much better than him. Good-looking, in the fleshy sort of way that men admire. A bit romantic. Really, I can’t say. We pass each other on the stairs. We meet on the landing. Everything happens on the landing. I had no idea that landings could be so thrilling. Ours has become the equivalent of Clapham Railway Junction. One of us is always going across it, or backing out of it – or lurking in a siding until the line is clear.’
    ‘And how’s your mother taken to it all?’
    ‘Yes, Mother’s keeping her end up.’
    ‘She doesn’t mind sleeping on the dining-table, or whatever it is she’s doing? Rum to picture her as a landlady, I must say! Has she steamed open any post yet?’
    Frances made no answer to that. But Christina didn’t seem to expect one. She was yawning again, and stretching, making those Lopokova points with her toes. They oughtn’t to leave the fire burning, she said, without toasting more cake. Had they room for a second helping? They decided that they had, and speared another two slices.
    And they had eaten the cake, and drunk their tea, when they heard the sound of a barrel organ starting up, out on the street. They tilted their heads to listen. The melody was a jumble of notes to begin with; then their ears got the thread of it. It was ‘Roses of Picardy’, the most banal tune imaginable, but one of the songs of their youth. They looked at each other. Frances, embarrassed, said, ‘This old thing.’
    But Christina scrambled to her feet. ‘Oh, let’s go and see.’
    The organist was on the pavement directly below them. He was an ex-service man in a trench-coat and Tommy’s cap, with a couple of campaign medals just visible at his breast. He had the organ on a set of pram wheels; it appeared to be held together with string. Its sound was so raw and almost discordant that the music seemed not so much to be rising from the box as tumbling out of it, as if the notes were physical things of glass or metal, landing clanging at the man’s feet.
    After a minute he looked up, saw the two of them watching, and lifted his cap to them. Frances went to her bag for money. She dithered, for a moment, when she found nothing smaller than a sixpence, but she returned to the open window and carefully threw the coin down. The man caught it in his cap, very neatly, tucked it away, and waved the cap again, keeping the organ going as he did it, without the slightest interruption.
    The sun had warmed the window-sill with real, summerish heat. Christina settled herself more comfortably, shutting her eyes, turning up her face. There were crumbs of cake at the corner of her mouth still, and butter on her lips: Frances smiled to see the shine of it, then let her own eyes close, giving herself over to the sunlight, to the niceness of the moment, and to the tune, that was so piercingly reminiscent of a particular phase of wartime.
    The note of the music wobbled. The man was moving on, still paying out the melody. As he turned to leave the pavement a board was revealed on the back of his trench-coat, on which he had painted the words:
     
    WILLING TO
    GRIND!
    WILL YOU
    EMPLOY ME?
    Frances and Christina watched him cross the