At last they start to share confidences, and Frances tells Lilian about her love affair with Christina, and her inability to be brave enough to embark on the life together they had planned. The two become tentative friends, take walks in the park, visit Lilian’s family. But though it is difficult to get used to meeting the Barbers on the stairs, having them pass through the kitchen on their way to the outside privy, and listening to them as they, or Lilian, decorate their rooms, slowly Frances comes to see Lilian in a different light. The shame and misery of these two women’s lives is conveyed with exquisite sensitivity, and the shudder they both experience at the thought of taking into their home two people whose origins are decidedly of a lower class (“the clerk class”) than their own is sadly understandable. 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 be deceived into thinking the money was a mere formality, and not the shabby heart of the whole affair. Frances could already hear the rustle of the pound notes and the slide and chink of the coins. So the advent of young Mr and Mrs Barber – Len and Lilian – will make a huge difference to the very shaky economy of the household: Servants have become unaffordable, and Frances spends most of her time cleaning, cooking and scrubbing floors, something she does with grim determination. Their over-large house has become an intolerable burden since the death of Frances’s father, the revelation of his bad debts, and the loss of two sons in the war. It is a Sunday afternoon in 1922, and Frances Wray and her mother are awaiting the arrival of their new paying guests with great trepidation. The novel begins in classic Waters style. But there’s some strong stuff in there which makes it, to use another well-worn phrase, not for the fainthearted. I hasten to say that of course this doesn’t mean The Paying Guests is a bad novel – on the contrary, it is superb.

I got to a point in the central section where I simply couldn’t bear to go on, and only overcame it by rationing myself to daytime reading rather then my preferred bedtime. Phew! Well, the term unputdownable is often bandied around – I’ve done some bandying myself – but there were times when Sarah Waters’ latest novel actually became unpickupable.

The paying guests by sarah waters