The Paying Guests

Lilian murders Leonard with the first available item: a large, bronze, stand ashtray. The ashtray, the figurative smoking gun of the novel, is a symbol of guilt and irony. It first makes its appearance on the front lawn as the Barbers move into the Wray house. Frances uses the ashtray to prop the door open to usher the Barbers into the house. It is frequently referred to in terms such as “the horrid bronze effect thing” (124). This language foreshadows the grizzly use it is put to later in the novel.

The ashtray is frequently mentioned in passing, merely part of the cluttered setting, until Lilian uses it to smash Leonard across the back of the head as he struggles with Frances. Frances burns the evidence clinging to it, “a scrap of something pale, with hairs attached to it, clinging to its base” (278). She stashes it behind the couch in the Barber’s room, where it is later discovered by Netta.

Netta brings the ashtray back into the center of the room right after Inspector Kempe discussed his suspicions about the method of Leonard’s murder. The presence of the ashtray is an externalized symbol of Frances’s guilty conscience. Kempe passes right by it, commenting on the little girl Violet’s imaginary cigarette. Even though he is a detective, he never makes mention of the sudden appearance of the large, bludgeon-like object. He already has a male suspect in mind, and believes it was done with a bludgeon, like Spencer’s cosh. The ashtray does not fit his narrative, so it is ignored. 

In Chapter 11, after all the police activity on the day after Leonard’s murder, Frances dreams of a crumbling house. She is the only one who can keep it standing, propping the walls up as they begin to fall; to Frances, “the task was like torture” and she is forced to go on all night, “staving off one impossible catastrophe after another” (315). This dream is a metaphor both for the seemingly impossible task of avoiding police scrutiny and taking care of Lilian, as well as the literal task of maintaining her household. Each new piece of evidence brought to light by Inspector Kempe is like another wall that she must hold up, and bit by bit, the task becomes more difficult. Trying to piece together the police suspicions concerning first Lilian, and later, Spencer Ward, causes Frances’s mental well-being to crumble.

As Frances becomes more and more invested in Lilian, she begins to neglect the chores that are necessary for the upkeep of the old Wray house. Frances frequently complains early on that because she is the sole housekeeper, there is always work to be done. Slacking causes it to accumulate to the detriment of the house’s stability. After Frances and Lilian have a falling out during the trial, Frances realizes that the “house had begun to fall apart […] as if the house were suddenly as weary as she was” (429). The anxiety expressed early on in her dream becomes reality. Much like many of her relationships in the novel, and the social hierarchy in post-war England, without proper maintenance, the old house actually begins to crumble.