The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

lap, his long-lashed eyes still wet with tears, but the tears themselves apparently forgotten; he seemed to be idly biting her thigh. He gazed up at Frances as he did it, and she repeated her anxiety about his having put his head between the banisters and possibly hurt his ear. Mrs Rawlins smiled – smiled in that pitying, knowing way in which married women often smiled, Frances had found, at the fears of spinsters, saying, Oh, they had ears of India-rubber at that age. And, to prove it, she reached for one of the boy’s already scarlet ears and drew the top and bottom tips of it together, then let them spring back against his scalp. The visitors laughed – the little girl laughing loudest, on a forced, hard, jarring note. The boy clapped his hands to his head, looking torn between triumph at having made a comedian of himself and mortification at the way he had done it. Mrs Viney, still tittering, said, ‘Poor Maurice. We oughtn’t to laugh. But there, if little boys will go putting their heads through other people’s banisters, they must expect to be laughed at.’ Her tone grew indulgent as she spoke, and she held out her hands to him. ‘Oh, come here to Nanny!’
    Come here to Nanny
…
While she fussed with the boy, the younger women looking on, Frances began to catch the resemblances between them all. Mrs Rawlins – Netta, the others called her – was, she realised, simply a more matronly Min. Vera had Mrs Viney’s button eyes, though with a drier expression in them. Even the boy and girl, she saw now, had the family look, the girl solid on sturdy legs, the boy fair but with the sort of fairness that would quickly darken, and each of them with a pink, full, elastic, unchildlike mouth – Mrs Barber’s mouth, in fact. She had just, with relief and surprise, worked the mystery out, when Mrs Barber herself came breathlessly into the room.
    She caught Frances’s eye first. ‘Miss Wray, I’m so sorry! Mrs Wray, how are you?’ Her smile pulled tight, and her tone wavered. ‘You’ve met my mother and my sisters, then?’
    ‘Oh, we’re great pals already,’ said Mrs Viney comfortably. ‘And there you were, Lil, saying as how the ladies would be out all day!’
    ‘She was hoping you wouldn’t meet us,’ Vera told Frances. ‘She’s ashamed of us.’
    ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mrs Barber, blushing.
    But, ‘Yes, that’s the truth of it!’ their mother cried gaily, her old-fashioned stays giving off a volley of pops and creaks. ‘Still, we make up in cheerfulness, Mrs Wray, what we lack in nice manners. And, oh, I do think this house delightful, really I do.’
    Frances’s mother, flushing, blinking, rapidly adjusting to the situation, said, ‘Thank you. Yes, it’s been a happy family home in its day. A little large, that’s all, for my daughter and me to manage now.’
    ‘Oh, no, you don’t want all that trouble. No, there’s nothing like a big house for trouble. There’s nothing brings your spirits down, I always think, like an empty room. You shall enjoy having company here now, I expect. And don’t you keep the back garden lovely!’
    ‘Oh, you’ve seen the garden, then?’
    ‘Yes, Lil took us over it.’
    ‘Just quickly,’ said Mrs Barber.
    ‘You might be right in the country here. Why, you’d never know you had a neighbour! Gives you quite a bank holiday mood. You could bring in trippers and do them teas. Now, a pokey old place like ours – we live behind my husband’s shop, on the Walworth Road, Vera, Min and me – well, that’s just old-fashioned. But a charming place like this…’
    She gazed appreciatively around the room – which seemed to have acquired even more flourishes since Frances had glimpsed it last, the hob grate with a bunch of paper poppies standing in it, the sofa covered in what looked like a chenille table-cloth, complete with bobbles on its hem, and the mantelpiece crowded now with postcards and ornaments: ebony elephants, brass monkeys, a china Buddha,