The Paying Guests

With her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, which depicted the lesbian demimonde of 1890s London, the Welsh-born writer Sarah Waters staked a formidable claim to that province of historical fiction populated by outlaws, social and sexual.  Since then she has successfully hopscotched eras, always favoring heroines as troubled as they are troublesome. Affinity, set in the 1870s, revolved around London’s Millbank Prison, while Fingersmith conjured up the city’s criminal underworld in the 1860s. The Night Watch, by contrast, had as its background the 1940s Blitz, and The Little Stranger, a superlative ghost story, nudged England into the 1950s.  Whatever the period, Waters is most effective when she is most restrained.  The stale air in an empty room, the shadow glimpsed in a hallway; such details may convey years of longing or a moment of dread, as Waters’s new novel, The Paying Guests, triumphantly demonstrates.  In the first chapter, we cross the threshold of a house soon to be transformed by passion and death. “Up on the wide landing they had to pause again,” she writes of two women. “The door on their left was closed . . . but the other doors all stood open, and the late afternoon sunlight, richly yellow now as the yolk of an egg, was streaming in through the two front rooms as far almost as the staircase.  It showed up the tears in the rugs, but also the polish on the Regency floorboards . . . the shine of dark toffee.” Floor stains will later take on a horrible significance.

Frances Wray, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of the house, is welcoming young Lillian Barber and her husband, Leonard, who have rented the upstairs rooms. “ . . . she tucked it in her pocket in a negligent sort of way,” Waters writes of Frances receiving the first payment, “as if anyone, she thought, could possibly be deceived into thinking that the money was a mere formality, and not the essence, the shabby heart and kernel, of the whole affair.” The year is 1922, and Frances and her widowed mother, clinging to respectability, are practically penniless thanks to the deceased Mr. Wray’s imprudence. Both Wray sons have been killed in the Great War, and the horror of the trenches stalks even genteel London in the form of destitute ex-servicemen and hollowed-out families. Waters deftly evokes the dwindling old order — the Wrays, their servants gone, drinking “watery cocoa” — encountering the rising tide of cocky office clerks like Barber and his girlish wife. This is the era incomparably captured by Elizabeth Bowen, and there are echoes here of Bowen, of Henry Green, and Rosamund Lehmann (of Dickens, too, when Lillian’s rambunctious family comes calling). The sinister undertone, however, is unmistakably Waters. “There were only the trees, the plants, the invisible flowers,” she writes of the garden at night, “a sense of stealthy vegetable activity just below the surface of sound.”

Desire, too, lies dormant. For Frances, we soon learn, has surrendered a lover for her mother’s sake — a female lover, at that — and the arrival of round, creamy Lillian Barber causes familiar stirrings. When Lillian starts reading Anna Karenina, we know what’s coming. “They had allowed this passion into the house,” Frances realizes. “It might have been a fugitive that the two of them had smuggled in by night, then hidden away in the attic or in the spaces between the walls.” Tension builds as the novel’s tone changes from drab to lurid, and even Waters’s unfortunate rhapsodic excesses (“You feel like wine.  My hand feels drunk”) cannot dispel the thickening fog of menace. The crime, when it suddenly occurs, is a clumsy, stumbling affair yet lethal:  “ . . . as they righted themselves there came another sort of blow, with a different sound to it — a smack, but an oddly liquid one, like a cricket bat meeting a wet ball.” And the sickening drudgery of what follows — a grotesque pantomime of housework, unflinchingly described — returns the novel to darkness. “Making her way back to the yard, looking again at the rosily lighted windows of her own and her neighbors’ houses,” Waters writes of Frances, “she had the stifling sensation that she was putting herself beyond the reach of those warm, ordinary rooms . . . ”

Waters drew inspiration for this story from some famous murder cases of the time, and the novel’s courtroom scenes are particularly fine (far more convincing in their plainness than the political outbursts inserted throughout the narrative). “There was some sort of proclamation, there were the raps of a staff or a gavel,” Frances observes on the trial’s opening day, “they sounded to her like the measured, unnatural raps of the dead on a séance table.” The novel’s outcome is similarly muted, its former passion surrendering finally to exhaustion.