The Paying Guests is a stunningly tense read, set in 1922 in a genteel but decaying suburb of south London called Champion Hill, where the big old houses had sculleries - rooms used for "dirty household work", says the dictionary - attached to the kitchens.
Before the war, Frances Wray, 26, and her mother had servants to do the dirty work, but in those days, the family was much larger, with two sons and a father. Both of Frances' brothers have been killed in the war and Mr Wray, a middle-class man whose reckless investments have drained all the family money, has died of "apoplexy", leaving his widow and daughter in penury. Even the costly Victorian antique furniture he bought has turned out to be worthless fakes.
At absolute rock-bottom, Frances and her mother have been forced to make a desperate decision: to convert the upstairs rooms into a flat and take in "paying guests", a snobbish term for lodgers. Frances retains her bedroom upstairs; her mother has moved into the dining room, an overcrowded room with "a suggestion of elderliness and a touch of the sick chamber", her daughter observes.
The book opens with, "The Barbers had said they'd arrive by three." But they haven't. The new young lodgers, Len and Lilian Barber, of the "clerical class", are late, a sign of more casual carelessness to come. When they finally do arrive, it's with swags of gaudy stuff - a portable gramophone, a wicker birdcage, scarves, a ghastly bronze-effect ashtray on a stand. Frances, inwardly appalled by this invasion, smiles politely and ushers them into her shabby home.
"You know with vampires, they are not allowed to enter the house unless they've been invited," says Waters. "I found it slightly like that. Frances is somehow complicit in bringing in what is going to be this very unruly passion into the house. It would be a heck of a thing to open up your house to people of the Barbers' class. The thing is, the Barbers are upwardly mobile, they are on their way up, whereas Frances and her mother are on their way down. The only way for Frances to deal with it is to be very sad and cross or poke fun at the Barbers and she does all three."
It's a two-way street. Len in particular is an unsettling presence, leaving the lavatory seat up (the loo is in the back garden, via the kitchen), hanging around wanting a chat as she cooks, staring at her, asking her if she fancies cucumbers. "Was there some sort of innuendo there?" Frances asks herself, as Len wanders off whistling Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy.
The house is so creaky and uninsulated, Frances and Mrs Wray often find themselves sitting in the drawing room in the evenings, looking up as the Barbers move from room to room. They can hear everything the Barbers do.
"I really like the idea of the house being a bit like a pressure cooker where they are all very conscious of each other," says Waters. "I have lived in shared houses over the years, very happily, but you do have to make negotiations about using space and what you share and what you blank out.
"One of the things I realised quite early was how important those spaces like the hall, the landing and the stairs were going to be, the points at which they were going to meet.
There is a lot of bouncing up and down the stairs. The house is like a Dickens house, a nervous house, echoing the anxiety of its inhabitants."
By stages, we learn more about Frances' past life, that she is a lesbian, and once had an intense relationship with a girl named Christina, with whom she is still friends. But where Christina lives in a flat and has a job, Frances is stuck, slaving each day to clean the house. Her hands, of which she is highly conscious, are described as "flaming ... ruined".
She blames her mother for the breakup with Christina.
"It started to be a bit self-punishing," says Waters. "As much as anything she is kind of getting at her mother. Her mother has made her stay in the house so she sort of thought, 'Right, I'm going to make you watch me being your servant.' I read a lot of books about home care from the period, how to clean things, how to get rid of certain stains, it's fascinating. I am not a great one for housework but I could really put myself in Frances' position. The very fact that she is doing it is painful for her mother. To see Frances on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor would be a dreadful sympton for her mother of where they had got to."
But we can't just have a novel about scrubbing the floor. The "unruly passion" leads to a truly terrible event, followed by - oh no, more scrubbing - sustained guilt, secrecy and an overwhelming terror that permeates every pore of Frances' being. Her mother - who is only 55 but seems much older - is looking very closely at her, then turning away with a glance that Frances interprets as fear. What does she know?
"A lot of my feelings about my mum informed my representation of Frances and her mother's relationship," says Waters. "Not that my relationship is like that - my mother is 80, she is an elderly woman and I feel sure that some of it was me projecting. The relationship you have with your mother is like nothing else. They do kind of know everything about you, even though they don't confront it. That is often a dynamic from childhood onwards. As a teenager you want to be independent and do slightly furtive things.
"That would be very much the case with Frances and her mother. Her mother knows about Frances' lesbian past but doesn't really want to think about it. Of course she can sense that Frances [and someone, whose name we can't reveal] have been drawn to each other and again she doesn't want to think about that."
There is no doubt that Waters gives her characters a really tough time in The Paying Guests. "Mmm," she says, sounding quite pleased with herself. "It's all about mess.
Frances is desperately trying to keep on top of mess in the first half and then in the second half, it becomes a moral mess, an emotional mess that undoes her. When I write it does seem like manipulation but once I start the story off and the characters become a bit more complex to me, they lead the story themselves, because I want it to ring true and be authentic so I can't be too manipulative. You have to let the characters evolve so it feels right."
Waters is a thoroughly nice person to talk to but it can be a funny thing chatting to someone on the other side of the world, especially if the phone line is slightly faint. Every time I said the word "Frances", quite a lot, my cat Frances, sitting on the table near the phone, gave me a look. Waters laughs at this. She shares an elderly cat with her partner, Lucy.
"Our cat is 14, Her name is Atkins," she giggles. "We were listening to the radio and they were talking about the Atkins Diet and every time they did, her ears were twitching. It's a sign of how intelligent she is."
Sarah Waters
• Born 1966 in Wales.
• Studied English literature at the universities of Kent and Lancaster, completing a PhD on lesbian and gay historical fiction.
• Work: Her first novel, Tipping The Velvet, set in a Victorian music hall and published in 1998, was adapted by Andrew Davies into a television drama series, starring Rachael Stirling and Keeley Hawes. Affinity (1999), set in a Victorian prison in London, was also adapted for TV, followed by Fingersmith in 2002, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Night Watch (2006), set in London during World War II, and The Little Stranger (2009), a ghost story set after the war, were also both shortlisted for the Man Booker.
• Writer Kate Mosse is a huge fan, saying: "Her research is lightly worn, but utterly trustworthy ... she is never showy, yet her writing is rich and inventive, the stuff of treats."
The Paying Guests (Virago $39.99) is out now.
