I loved the detail, the slow build up of tension, the deft portrayal of growing intimacy, the social insight. Until, that is, an unexpected turn of fate tries the two nearly beyond endurance.Īs Jenny said: Sarah Waters, why are you so good at being a writer? I loved The Paying Guests. Frances, who during the War “believe in transformation” and that “nothing could ever be the same”, feels trapped in her current life but her growing intimacy with Lillian Barber slowly begins to show her new possibilities.
But the life the two could have lived together seems to her forever gone. Frances remains friends with Christina, and sometimes visits her in her flat in Bloomsbury - a welcome respite from suburban Champion Hill. But neither Frances’ nor Christina’s family reacted well to the fact that the two were lesbians, and the resulting tensions drove them apart. The years around the Great War, however, weren’t only a time of losses: Frances also fell in love with Christina, a girl she met at a suffrage march. But even then it’s difficult to make ends meet, and so the two decide to take in lodgers - or, as the neighbours delicately put it, “paying guests”: Leonard and Lillian Barber, a young couple of the nascent “clerk class”. The household staff was dismissed, and to her mother’s distress Frances started doing the housekeeping and cleaning herself. The Great War took Frances’ two brothers, and when her father died of a stroke, Frances and her mother discovered that the family money was very nearly gone.
Like many other impoverish genteel families, Frances and her mother live in a mostly empty house they can hardly afford to keep, and which is full of pictures of the deceased. She adjusted her pose on the mat, took hold of her cloth, and rubbed hard at the floor.Set in 1922, The Paying Guests tells the story of Frances Wray, a single woman in her mid twenties who’s struggling to adjust to the post-war world. An image sprang into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat.
But this, she thought, shuffling backward over the tiles, this was what it really meant to have lodgers: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door. Sitting at her bureau a short time before, Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms - as something like two great waddling shillings. Like the parted kimono, the sounds were unsettling the silence was most unsettling of all.
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