The Paying Guests

“‘How are your paying guests?’ she asked. She was too polite to call them lodgers.’” 

Frances’s neighbor, Mrs. Hillyard, skirts the issue of the Wrays having taken in lodgers. Becoming landladies is indicative of financial problems; therefore, the subject is somewhat taboo. However, this does not prevent the residents of the upper-class Champion Hill neighborhood from being inquisitive. 

“‘It seems to me that ‘Victorian’ is a word that’s used nowadays to dismiss all sorts of virtues over which people no longer wish to take the trouble.’” 

Mrs. Wray’s reaction to Frances accusing her of being mid-Victorian is evidence of a generational conflict at play. World War I marked a break from the more traditional values of the preceding era. The youth, like Frances, Christina, and Stevie begin to take on more rebellious, independent attitudes. 

“‘The truth is, the most hateful thing my father ever did to me was to die. I—I’d had plans, you see, while he was alive. I’d had terrific plans—’” 

This passage makes clear the reason for the resentment Frances holds toward her father. Her love for reform and the political dreams she held were ruined by his death: instead of building a career for herself, she had to devote herself to taking care of her mother and paying off Mr. Wray’s debts. 

“‘No, don’t ever get married, Miss Wray. Ask any wife! It isn’t worth it. You don’t know how lucky you are, being single, able to come and go just as you please—’” 

Trapped in a troubled marriage, Lilian envies the freedom Frances has as an unattached woman. She looks past the social stigma of spinsterhood and sees only the positive side. Lilian and Leonard’s marriage was a rushed mistake, and now she must live with the consequences.

“‘I miss the war too. You’ve no idea, Mr. Crowther, what it costs to admit that. But we can’t succumb to that feeling, can we? We’ll fade away like ghosts if we do. We have to change our expectations. The big things don’t count any more. I mean the capital-letter notions that got so many of our generation killed. But that makes the small things count more than ever, doesn’t it?” 

The end of World War I signaled the difficult transition back into peacetime. For the country, this meant that the great union over a common cause ended, and an uncertain era of change began. During the war, Frances had something to protest, a great political cause to rally around; after the war, she settled into a domestic life, giving up her relationship with Christina in order to take care of her home and her mother. Frances has unwillingly returned to a domesticated life rather than giving herself over to radical change.

“He was the type of man who twenty or even ten years before, would never have dreamed of sitting down and chatting so freely with a woman of Frances’s class” 

Peacetime witnessed the dissolving of the rigid class structure present in the Edwardian and Victorian eras. Ewart is a working-class driver; an earnest, evidently kind man. While Frances spends most of their conversation thinking of Lilian, she does take a liking to Ewart. Were they from a previous generation, it would be presumptuous for Ewart to expect a friendly reception from someone from Champion Hill, and it would have been below Frances to acknowledge him. 

“It was like nothing Frances had ever known. She seemed to have lost a layer of skin, to be kidding not simply with her lips but with her nerves, her muscles, her blood. It was nearly too much.” 

Frances and Lilian’s first sexual encounter is a moment of a great release of tension and a reconciliation of the miscommunication between the two since Frances revealed her homosexuality to Lilian. At this point, Frances is an escape for Lilian. Though Frances tells her at the end of the encounter that she loves her, Lilian does not verbally reciprocate the sentiment until much later.

“‘Oh,’ Lilian answered automatically, ‘I don’t care what he thinks. And it isn’t as though I’m going with a man, is it?’” 

Lilian almost automatically devalues her relationship with Frances. She has been socially indoctrinated to believe that female relationships do not count in the same way that male relationships do. Indeed, laws that criminalized homosexual behavior in the United Kingdom at the time only did so for male offenders. This is an indication, however, that Lilian could be using Frances, as the reader later discovers Lilian began her affair with Frances after she found out about Leonard’s infidelity. 

“But Perhaps, Frances thought, her family had simply kept to its level while she and her mother had started slipping down the scale. The idea was disconcerting.” 

Despite Frances’s seemingly radical inclinations, she is still caught up in the same obsession with social class that she critiques in her mother. Edith did not rise in social class; the Wray women fell. This concern indicates that Frances, like Lilian, does care deeply about what others think of her.  

“‘No, no, it only isn’t safe when it’s become a real baby, when you leave it too long and have to put something in there to get the baby out. But that’s different. That’s unnatural. That’s a sin, and against the law. I’d never do that.’” 

Lilian’s insistence on the safety of having an abortion proves to be ironic: the forced miscarriage sets off the fatal chain of events that leads her to kill her husband. Chemically induced abortions, like physically induced ones, were dangerous in the 1920s. In addition, the fact that Lilian has had an abortion before exposes Frances to the fact that there is a lot she does not know about Lilian; they have only known each other for a few months, and this creates room for doubt.

“The ashtray! The stand-ashtray!—even then, it didn’t occur to her that Lilian or the ashtray had anything to do with his fall. She thought only of getting away from him before he could rise and grab her again.” 

Leonard’s murder and its aftermath becomes the central problem of the final arc of the novel. Lilian swinging the ashtray at her husband seems to Frances an absurd act; it is so out of the bounds of her ordinary life that it takes some time for the truth to sink in that Leonard is dead. While Lilian claims it was an accident, the events that follow during the police investigation cause Frances to question her motives. 

“It was all so unintimate, so unmenacing, compared with the sweaty horrors of the night before. Leonard’s face, it seemed to her, might have been a bad plasticine model, one side grey, the other almost purple, with no care taken over the join. His eyes were part-way open, but his mouth was closed and tidy. […] This was not a Leonard who would wake, raise his arms, grab and denounce one. This was no Leonard at all.” 

Frances examines Leonard’s body with an almost clinical eye. While Leonard himself cannot denounce Lilian as his murderer, the traces left on his body—the wound on his head, evidence left on his clothing—could lead the police back to Lilian and Frances. This scene also reemphasizes to the reader that Leonard’s character is gone: he has formed part of the backdrop for the house at Champion Hill’s domestic scenes, and his absence indicates the changes to come. 

“Oh, wasn’t it atrocious bad luck? Didn’t it beggar belief? Poor Lil had been in the family way for the first time in years and the doctor was saying that the shock of Len’s death had brought on a miss.” 

Mrs. Viney, returning to Frances after the police doctor examined Lilian, reveals that the doctor believes Lilian has had a miscarriage. This provides a ready cover-up for Lilian’s abortion. It also explains away her obvious ill health and creates a more solid excuse for her disoriented behavior. 

“The Whole thing, she decided, was like a nightmarish wedding, with Lilian the unhappy bride, Leonard the eternally jilting bridegroom, and none of the guests wanting to be there or quite knowing what to do.” 

Frances again uses heteronormative matrimony to help her process an event that is beyond the pale of her experience. Depicting the police court as a wedding makes it something domestic, in which each actor has a role that she is familiar with. However, this is an appropriate analysis: Lilian and Leonard had a miserable marriage, which culminated in Leonard’s death, possibly due to Lilian’s pent-up frustration.

“‘Don’t they? It seems to me that men do that all the time. We’ve just come out of a war in which they did nothing else! Eric and Noel and John Arthur—what were they killed for, but for nonsense, for lies! And who protested against that? Not you and my mother! And now a single man has lost his life and everyone’s leaping to these ludicrous conclusions—” 

Mrs. Playfair and Mrs. Wray both lost sons to the war. France’s nerves are already at their breaking point; Mrs. Playfair’s comment that men do not kill each other for no reason causes her to break social restraint and go off on her, despite the fact that such a vehement defense of Lilian looks suspicious. Frances draws strong parallel between Leonard’s senseless murder and the killing during the war. Leonard survived the war only to be murdered at home. 

“‘The policy was opened when Mr. Barber was first married, but it was extended in July this year—not long after the night of the party, as a matter of fact. Altogether, Mr. Barber’s life was insured for five hundred pounds.’” 

The revelation that Leonard’s life was insured for a large sum of money casts doubt upon whether or not Lilian swinging the ashtray at him was an accident. Lilian had a monetary incentive for getting rid of her husband. This would be enough money for she and Frances to start their new life together and it would remove the hurdle of divorce entirely.

“‘They think they’ve solved the case already. They’re going to act, I know they are. Lilian knows it too. I’m worried she’ll do something rash. I know how her mind works. She’s thinking that if things have got this bad, that if people have already taken against Charlie, and against her—She’s thinking—” 

Frances’s desperation and frayed nerves nearly trip her up in her web of lies as she discusses the inquisition with Christina. Christina is the only person who knows about Frances and Lilian’s relationship, and this makes her both a valuable and dangerous confidante for Frances. Christina is the only person Frances can express her worry for Lilian to, but she can only go say so much without incurring Christina’s suspicion. 

“All this time, Leonard must have been having an affair of his own. He’d been seeing some girl, some girl named Billie. It was the girl’s boyfriend who’d been accused of killing him.”

Spenser Ward has the correct motivation and criminal past to make him a prime suspect in Leonard’s murder. Only Frances and Lilian know otherwise. This creates an even deeper moral dilemma for the two women: will they let an innocent man take the fall for their crime?

“The anger was so pure, so complete, it amazed her. It was as if the feeling had been inside her, waiting for the signal to come out. She thought of all she had done in the past ten days all those crumbling walls she had been frantically propping up. She thought of the breach with Christina, the suspicion in her mother’s eyes.” 

The knowledge that Lilian had known about Leonard’s affair and the pregnancy suggests that her commitment to Frances is not motivated out of pure love. Frances has sacrificed a lot for Lilian. Lilian’s dishonesty is a huge blow, which causes Frances to erupt in anger toward her for the first time. This passage also echoes Frances’s nightmare of trying to hold up a house’s crumbling walls. 

“You took the wall, Lilian. I thought it charming, at the time. But you’ve been taking the wall ever since. You can’t take it for ever. You can’t take it now.” 

Whether Frances’s scathing criticism of Lilian’s behavior actually sinks in or if Lilian is calling Frances’s bluff is unclear. Frances believes that Lilian has been using her, ceding decision-making to her as she would a man. Whatever the case, it has an immediate effect on Lilian’s behavior: she soberly gets ready to turn herself in, only stopping at Frances’s behest. 

“She was struggling to find something about him that she could pity, something she could like. At the same time, it seemed impossible to her that anyone could seriously believe that he had committed a murder: he was so puny, so youthful, so sham. All around the room, though, she saw people looking at him in fascinated horror.” 

Frances’s first impression of Spenser Ward is inconclusive. She carries similar class prejudices as much of the courtroom audience: Spencer is uncouth, rude, and generally unlikeable. However, Frances is one of the only two people in the room who knows he is innocent of Leonard’s murder: she struggles to find something likeable about him in an attempt to override the self-preservation instinct that would have her allow him to be framed for Lilian’s crime. 

“Lilian had written those words after finding those tickets in Leonard’s pocket, in the knowledge that she had started a baby by him. Had she written them out of spite? Had she written them in calculation? Had she planned the whole thing, even then?” 

The discovery that Lilian had known about Leonard’s affair with Billie Grey threatens to upend her and Frances’s already strained relationship. Frances now suspects Lilian’s motivations; she almost believes Lilian killed Leonard on purpose, that her powerful swing of the ashtray was more than just an accident. This was hinted at by the police, who explained how hard the cosh must have been swung to kill a man. 

“The jury has 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 shriveled away when one was frightened.” 

Spencer Ward’s neighbor is of a lower class and dubious credibility. However, this passage represents the dissolving of class lines around the concept of decency: the neighbor risked his reputation in order to ensure an innocent man was not found guilty. However, Frances knows that any noble intentions can be thwarted by guilt and fear for one’s life.