Sarah Waters: ‘I wanted The Paying Guests to be sexy without being a romp’

One of the best decisions I ever made as an author was to keep a writing diary, a record of each day’s advances, along with plans, thoughts and queries about my current novel-in-progress. Surveying this at the end of a project provides a fascinating vision of the evolution of a book – though I invariably find that it’s a catalogue of complaints (“horrible day”, “appalling day”, “realised that most of what I wrote last week was rubbish”), relieved only rarely by moments of insight and sweaty euphoria: “Think I’m getting there at last, thank Christ!”

These journals are always substantial, but at more than 170,000 words my Paying Guests diary is only slightly shorter than the book itself, and the process it documents was more than usually knotty. That slightly perplexes me now, for the novel’s conception was straightforward. Having set my two previous books in the 1940s I thought I’d venture back a couple of decades, and in the pursuit of information about British domestic life in the interwar years I began looking at murder cases; I went to them purely, really, for the sake of their incidental detail. But two cases caught my attention, that of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters in 1922, and of Alma Rattenbury and Percy Stoner in 1935 – both cases involving a husband, his wife and her young male lover, in which a moment’s reckless violence had fatal consequences for almost everyone concerned. To take even a glance at these stories is to appreciate what a muddle this sort of crime is – nothing at all like the neat and bloodless murders of the period’s detective fiction. And to examine Thompson’s story in particular is to uncover fascinating public and private anxieties about class and gender and female sexual agency. I found myself wondering how differently a case like hers would have played out if its dynamics had not been so classically heterosexual. I began to imagine a suburban house with four people in it: a grieving, genteel mother, her discontented spinster daughter, and the married “clerk-class” lodgers with whom they’ve been obliged to share their home.

View image in fullscreen

That was in October 2009. It would be more than four years before The Paying Guests was complete. What made the process so convoluted? It was partly a question of research. The 1920s still felt opaque to me, and I needed to embed my characters in their historical context. That meant exploring newspapers, diaries, letters, novels, maps, photographs; I had to get to grips with police procedure, legal process, forensics, fashion, cookery and housework. Then I had to decide on the tone of the novel. I wanted it to have the tension of a thriller, I realised, without feeling generic. I wanted it to be sexy without being a romp. And I wanted it to be morally complex – a story, as I put it in my diary, about “decent people doing stupid things”. But each of these discoveries took time to figure out, and had to be achieved, not theoretically, but through the writing itself – through trial and error, and patient redrafting.

Most of that redrafting centred on my lovers, Frances and Lilian. In the first few drafts Lilian is a bit of a coquette, leading Frances towards catastrophe; Frances herself is shrill and self-deluded; their relationship has no heart. My early readers were unimpressed, and about two years into the writing process the diary hits a low point. (“I’ve got to make Lilian more lovable and Frances more likable.”) The crisis, however, was invaluable. By confronting what wasn’t working, I saw how to get the book on track. I soon came to like Frances and Lilian very much indeed; even now, I miss them. I had understood that the novel should be, in the truest sense, a love story – that it was about the negotiations that must be made by a passionate relationship as it braves the tangle of courage and cowardice, generosity and meanness, splendid ambition and awful misjudgment that constitutes ordinary life.

“Ordinariness”, in fact, is right at the core of this novel. People have sometimes suggested to me that my fiction is full of lavatories, and it’s true that key moments in The Paying Guests take place in the most mundane locations – over a picnic in a park, in a Clapham back-parlour, in a scullery. A final emotional admission is made, yes, in a ladies’ loo. But it’s the small, unlovely places of life that have always called most eloquently to me: they’re the ones that traditional histories tend to overlook, but they often provide the settings for some of our most intense personal dramas – especially, perhaps, if we are women. And as the stories of figures such as Thompson and Rattenbury remind us, the “ordinary” can accommodate thoroughly extraordinary levels of passion and tragedy.

With those models in mind, I wanted The Paying Guests, above all, to achieve two things: to evoke, convincingly, the intricate fabric of interwar domesticity; and then to set that fabric thrumming with desire, transgression and moral crisis.