So, this is weird – I finished The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters last week and today, as I sat down to write a review, I realised that I have no recollection of how the story ended. This means one of two things – either I have some serious memory issues or the ending wasn’t a particularly good one. I’m going with the later.
It’s 1922, and in South London, in a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants, life is transformed for widowed Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances when they are forced to take in lodgers – to ‘make ends meet’.
Frances and her mother sat with books at the French windows, ready to eke out the last of the daylight – having got used, in the past few years, to making little economies like that.
The lodgers are Lilian and Leonard Barber, a brash young couple of the ‘clerk class’. Their arrival changes everything, upsetting the routines of the house and involving Frances and Mrs Wray in a devastating situation (to say more would be a spoiler).
But lurid touches were everywhere, she saw with dismay. It was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick. The faded carpet in her mother’s old bedroom was lost beneath pseudo-Persian rugs.
The writing is solid. It’s not flashy or particularly poetic but Waters creates great tension in everyday scenes – a lot can be said for curtain-twitching and indiscrete comments at an afternoon tea.
I enjoyed the subtle (very subtle) but ever-present undercurrent of shame that runs through the story – from Frances’s secret meetings in London with her friend Christina to the fact that it’s necessary for Mrs Wray and Frances to take ‘paying guests’ –
She tried to arrange her features into a businesslike expression as she took the envelope from Mrs Barber’s hand, and she tucked it in her pocket in a negligent sort of way – 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.
Shame is at the core of a major plot point (which I won’t give away) but it’s enough to say that it’s reasonable motivation for Frances’s actions and in turn, saves the story from becoming melodramatic.
They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.
This was my first book by Waters and the style reminded me a little of Kate Morton (without Morton’s predictable backwards-and-forwards-in-time plots). Although I enjoyed the story while I was reading (and would recommend it to particular people), it’s the kind of book I would only choose occasionally – fairly certain I have an historical-thriller threshold.
3/5 Engaging.
Frances is given a glass of Claret Cup to drink at a party.
