In love with the lodger

Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends meet in their genteel villa. Servantless, Mrs Wray keeps up appearances while her daughter Frances confronts the reality of hands-and-knees housework. Reluctantly, they advertise for ‘paying guests’, and are rewarded with Leonard and Lilian Barber, who are young, noisy, sexy and vulgar, with a whiff of the music-hall about them.

This is perfect territory for Sarah Waters. Women reshaping their lives without men, social barriers dismantled through economic necessity, notions of respectability challenged by the world convulsion of the preceding years. It’s a setting in which she can explore the interface between the internal and external lives of her characters with the heightened sense of reality at which she excels.

Frances, once a frequenter of political meetings with an interesting female lover, is now forced by circumstances to engage with tiny economies and household dirt, leaving no time for an intellectual or personal life. She resents the ‘dishonesty’ of the house which has imprisoned her — ‘the scuffs and tears she had patched and disguised; the gap where the long-case clock had stood…the dinner gong, bright with polish, that hadn’t been rung in years’ — but nevertheless washes the hall floor with vinegar, rakes out the ashes of the stove, struggles to render breast of lamb edible, dusts the ‘barleytwist curves of wonky table-legs and the scrolls and lozenges of rough-hewn chairs’ — all the useless, pretentious furniture that belonged to the lost family life. Frances would happily ‘have the damn things carted away’, but her mother — an excellent study of a distressed gentlewoman — cannot let go of the past.

From the moment curvy, colourful Lilian Barber enters the house it’s obvious which way things will go.