Don’t you know the war’s over?’ the man behind the counter in a baker’s shop asked Kay.
He said it because of her trousers and hair, trying to be funny; but she had heard this sort of thing a thousand times, and it was hard to smile. When he caught her accent, anyway, his manner changed. He handed over the bag, saying, ‘There you are, madam.’ But he must have given some sort of look behind her back because, as she went out, the other customers laughed.
She was used to that, too. She tucked the bag under her arm and put her hands in her trouser pockets. The best thing to do was brazen it out, throw back your head, walk with a swagger, make a ‘character’ of yourself. It was tiring, sometimes, when you hadn’t the energy for it; that’s all.
Today, as it happened, her spirits were rather high. The idea had come to her, that morning, to pay a visit to a friend. She’d walked from Lavender Hill to Bayswater, and was now heading up the Harrow Road. Her friend, Mickey, worked in a garage there, as an attendant on the pumps.
Kay could see her in the forecourt of the garage as she drew closer: Mickey had set up a canvas chair, and was lounging in it reading a book. Her legs were spread out, for she was dressed, not exactly mannishly, as Kay was, but like a boy-mechanic, in dungarees and boots. Her hair was fair, the colour and texture of dirty rope; it was sticking up as if she had just got out of bed. As Kay watched, she licked a finger and turned a page. She didn’t hear Kay coming, and Kay walked towards her with a queer sort of stirring in her heart. It was simply the pleasure of seeing a friend, after seeing, for weeks at a time, only strangers; that’s all it was. But for a second Kay thought the feeling was going to expand up into her throat and make her cry. She imagined how ridiculous she’d look to Mickey, turning up out of the blue like this, in tears. And she thought seriously of giving the whole thing up—slipping away before Mickey should see her.
Then the feeling shrank back down again.
‘Hello, Mickey,’ she called blandly.
Mickey looked up, saw Kay, and laughed with pleasure. She laughed all the time, in an unforced, natural sort of way that people found awfully winning. Her voice was a throaty one, with a permanent cough in it. She smoked too much. ‘Hey!’ she said.
‘What’s the book?’
Mickey showed the cover. She read the books that people left in their cars, when they brought their cars to the garage to be fixed. This one was a paperback copy of Wells’s The Invisible Man. Kay took it, and smiled. ‘I read that,’ she said, ‘when I was young. Have you got to the bit where he makes the cat invisible, except for its eyes?’
‘Yes, isn’t it funny?’ Mickey was rubbing her greasy palm on her dungarees, so that she could take Kay’s hand. She was so small and slender, her hand was not much bigger than a child’s. She tilted her head, half-closed one eye. She looked like the Artful Dodger. She said, ‘I’d just about given up on you, I haven’t seen you in so long! How are you keeping?’
‘I thought it might be your lunch-break. Do you get a lunch-break? I brought you some buns.’
‘Buns!’ said Mickey, taking the bag and looking inside it. Her blue eyes widened. ‘Jam ones!’
‘With genuine saccharine.’
A car drew in. ‘Hang on,’ said Mickey. She put the buns down and went to speak to the driver and, after a second, began the business of filling up the car’s tank. Kay took her place in the canvas chair, lifting the book and opening it at random.
‘But you begin to realise now,’ said the Invisible Man, ‘the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter—no covering—to get clothing was to forgo all my advantage, to make of myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.’
‘I never thought of that,’ said Kemp.
Meanwhile, the pump had sprung into life and begun to throb and whine and click, and the smell of petrol, which had been faint before, grew heady. Kay put the book down and looked at Mickey. She was standing rather nonchalantly, one hand on the roof of the car, the other tense about the trigger of the petrol-gun, her eyes on the dial on the face of the machine. She was not quite handsome, but carried herself with a certain style; and it was extraordinary how many girls—even normal girls—could be intrigued and impressed by a pose like this.
The driver of this car, however, was a man. Mickey tapped the last few drops of petrol from the gun, screwed on the cap of his tank, took his coupons, and came sauntering back to Kay, pulling a face.
‘No tip?’ said Kay.
‘He gave me threepence, and told me to buy a lipstick with it. His motor was rubbish, too. Wait here, will you? I’ll talk to Sandy.’
She disappeared into the garage. When she came back a few minutes later she had taken off her dungarees to reveal ordinary blue slacks and a funny little Aertex shirt, full of creases and stains. She had washed her face and combed her hair. ‘He’s given me forty-five minutes. Shall we go to the boat?’
‘Do we have time?’ asked Kay.
‘I think so.’
They went, as quickly as they could, down a couple of side-streets until they reached the Regent’s Canal. A hundred yards along the tow-path there was a line of house-boats and barges. Mickey had lived here since before the start of the war. It was quite a little village. There were warehouses and boatyards all about it, but the residents were artists and writers as well as real bargees—all rather self-consciously ‘interesting’ and ‘picturesque’, Kay sometimes thought them; all rather overpleased with the figures they knew they cut to the people who lived in ordinary flats and houses. Still, perhaps that was fair enough. Mickey’s boat—Irene—was a stubby little barge with a pointed prow, and always made Kay think of a clog. Its hull was tarred, and patched alarmingly. Every morning Mickey had to spend twenty minutes or more thrusting and drawing on the handle of a horrid little pump. Her WC was a bucket, set up behind a canvas screen. In winter the contents of the bucket could turn to ice.
But the interior of the boat was very charming. The walls were panelled with varnished wood, and Mickey had made shelves for ornaments and books. The lights were Tilly lamps, and candles in coloured shades. The galley kitchen was like a giant version of a child’s pencil-box, with secret drawers and sliding panels. The plates and cups were kept in their places with bars and straps. Everything was fastened as if against the swell of a high sea; in fact, the roll of the surface of the canal was quite gentle, and only disconcerting if you were unused to it or had forgotten what to expect.
Kay always stooped a little when she stood in Mickey’s boat. If she straightened, the top of her head just brushed the ceiling. Mickey herself moved about with perfect ease and comfort—sliding back some of the panels in the galley to bring out tea, a teapot, two enamel mugs. ‘I can’t boil the water,’ she said—the stove had gone out, and they hadn’t time to relight it—‘but I’ll get some from the girl next door.’
She went off with the teapot in her hand, and Kay sat down. The boat rocked, bumping hollowly against the bank, as a series of barges went by. She heard the voices of men, unnervingly clear: ‘—up Dalston way. I swear to God! Going up and down, like a ruddy great monkey on a—’
Mickey returned with the water, and set out tin plates. Kay picked up her bun, then put it down again. She took out her cigarettes instead—but paused, with the lighter in her hand. She gestured to the stains on Mickey’s shirt.
‘I suppose it’s all right to smoke around you? After all that prancing about, I mean, with the petrol-gun. You won’t go up in a whoosh of flame or anything?’
‘Not if you’re careful,’ said Mickey, laughing.
‘Well, thank goodness for that. For I should hate it, you know, if you did.’ She held the cigarettes out. ‘Care for a tickler?’
Mickey took one. Kay lit it for her, then lit her own. Behind her head was a sliding window: she pushed it open, to draw off the smoke.
‘How are things at Sandy’s?’ she asked, turning back.
Mickey shrugged. She was only at the garage, really, because it was one of the few places a woman could work and wear trousers. She had to have some sort of job: she didn’t, like Kay, have a wealthy family behind her, an income of her own. She’d begun to think, she told Kay now, of trying for a post as a chauffeur. She liked the idea of driving again, and of getting out of London.
They talked this over while they smoked. Mickey ate her bun, then opened the bag and ate another. Kay, however, left her own bun sitting in front of her, untasted; and Mickey said at last, ‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’
‘Why? Do you want it?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I’ve already eaten.’
‘I bet you have. I know your meals. Tea and tobacco.’
‘And gin, if I’m lucky!’
Mickey laughed again. The laugh became a cough. But, ‘Eat it up,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Go on. You’re still too thin.’
‘So what?’ said Kay. ‘Everybody’s thin, aren’t they? I’m in fashion, that’s all.’
Actually the greasy, saccharine look of the bun had made her start to feel almost queasy; but now, for Mickey’s sake, she picked the thing up and began to nibble at it. The sensation of the dough on her tongue and in her throat was horrible; but Mickey watched until she’d eaten it all.
‘All right now, matron?’
‘Not bad,’ said Mickey, narrowing her eye, looking like the Artful Dodger again. ‘Next time, I’ll buy you a dinner.’
‘You want to feed me up.’
‘Why not? We could make a night of it, get a bit of a crowd together.’
Kay pretended to shudder. ‘I’d be the skeleton at the feast. Besides’—she tossed her head like a debutante—‘I’m awfully busy these days. I go out all the time.’
‘You go to funny places.’
‘I go to the cinema,’ said Kay; ‘there’s nothing funny about that. Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way—people’s pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures. Or perhaps that’s just me…But you can get up to all sorts at the movies; you take my word for it. You can even—’
‘Even what?’
Kay hesitated. Even get up a woman, she’d been going to say, crudely; for one night recently at the cinema she’d got talking to a tipsy girl, and had finished by leading the girl into an empty lavatory and kissing her and feeling her up. The thing had been rather savagely done; she felt ashamed, thinking of it now. ‘Even nothing,’ she said flatly, at last. ‘Even nothing…Anyway, you could always come and visit me.’
‘At Mr Leonard’s?’ Mickey made a face. ‘He gives me the creeps.’
‘He’s all right. He’s a miracle worker. One of his patients told me. He cured her shingles. He could fix your chest.’
Mickey drew back, coughing again. ‘No fear!’
‘You dear butch thing,’ said Kay. ‘He wouldn’t actually have to look at it. You just sit in a chair and he whispers at you.’
‘He sounds bloody depraved. You’ve been there too long; you can’t tell how weird it is any more. And what about that house? When’s it going to fall down?’
‘It’s on its way,’ said Kay, ‘believe me. When the wind gets up, I can feel it swaying. I can feel it groaning. It’s like being at sea. I think it’s only thanks to Mr Leonard that it stays up at all. I think he keeps the place standing through sheer force of mind.’
Mickey smiled. But she was looking into Kay’s face, and her gaze had grown serious. And when her smile had faded she said, in a different sort of voice, ‘How much longer are you going to stay there, Kay?’
‘Till the day it collapses, I hope!’
‘I mean it,’ said Mickey. She hesitated, as if thinking something over. Then, ‘Listen,’ she said, leaning forward. ‘Why don’t you come and live here with me?’
‘Live here?’ said Kay, surprised. ‘On the Quaint Irene?’ She glanced around. ‘She’s not much bigger than a shoe-box. That’s all right for a little powder-monkey like you.’
‘Just for a while,’ said Mickey. ‘If I get that driving job, I’d be away on overnights.’
‘What about the rest of the time? Say you brought a girl back?’
‘We could work something out.’
‘Hang up a blanket? I might as well be back at boarding-school! Besides, I couldn’t leave Lavender Hill. You don’t know what it means to me. I’d miss Mr Leonard. I’d miss the little boy with his great big boot. I’d miss the Stanley Spencer couple! I’ve grown attached to the old place.’
‘I know you have,’ said Mickey. She said it in a way that meant: That’s what bothers me.
Kay looked away. She’d been talking lightly all this time, putting on an act, trying to hide the fact that, as before, real emotion was rising up in her, making her embarrassed and afraid. For here, she thought, was Mickey, on about a pound a week, ready to share it—just like that, at the drop of a hat, through simple kindness. And here was Kay herself, with money unspent, and with absolutely nothing wrong with her, living like a cripple, like a rat.
She moved forward and picked up her tea. She found, to her horror, that her hands were shaking. She didn’t want to put the mug back down and draw attention to the tremor; she lifted it higher, and tried to meet it with her mouth. But the tremor grew worse. Tea spilled; she saw it stain one of Mickey’s cushions. Abruptly, she set the mug down again and tried to mop up the worst of it with her handkerchief.
She caught Mickey’s eye as she was doing it; and her shoulders sank. She leant forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands.
‘Look at me, Mickey!’ she said. ‘Look at the creature I’ve become! Did we really do those things we did?—you and I, when the war was on? Sometimes I can’t bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings. We carried stretchers, for God’s sake! I remember lifting’—she spread her hands—‘I remember lifting the torso of a child…What the hell happened to me, Mickey?’
‘You know what happened,’ Mickey said softly.
Kay sat back and turned away, in disgust at herself. ‘It’s no more than happened to thousands of us. Who didn’t lose someone, or something? I could walk on any street in London, stretch out my arm, touch a woman or a man who lost a lover, a child, a friend. But I—I can’t get over it, Mickey. I can’t get over it.’ She laughed, unhappily. ‘Get over it. What a funny phrase that is! As if one’s grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one’s way over the rubble to the ground on the other side…I’ve got lost in my rubble, Mickey. I can’t seem to find my way across it. I don’t think I want to cross it, that’s the thing. The rubble has all my life in it still—’
For a second she couldn’t go on. She looked around the cabin of the boat, then spoke more quietly.
‘Do you remember that night, when we all sat here? That night just before—? Sometimes I think about times like that. I bloody torture myself with thinking about times like that! Do you remember it?’
Mickey nodded. ‘I remember it.’
‘I’d been to that place in Bethnal Green. You made gin slings.’
‘Gin gimlets.’
Kay looked up. ‘Gin gimlets? Are you sure?’
Mickey nodded.
‘Weren’t there lemons?’
‘Lemons? Where the hell would we have got lemons? We had lime juice, remember, in a bottle of Binkie’s?’
Kay did remember it, now. The fact that she’d misremembered before—misremembered to the extent that she’d been able to picture Mickey actually cutting up the lemons, squeezing out the juice—made her uneasy.
‘Lime juice,’ she said, frowning, ‘in a bottle. Why should I have forgotten that?’
‘Don’t think about it, Kay.’
‘I don’t want to think about it! But I don’t want to forget it, either. Sometimes I can think of nothing else but things like that. My mind has hooks in it. Little hooks.’
But now she sounded almost crazy. She turned her head again, and looked out of the window. The sunlight made patterns on the water. A slick of oil had colours in silver and blue…She turned back into the cabin, and found Mickey checking her watch.
‘Kay,’ said Mickey. ‘I’m sorry, mate. I’ve got to get back to Sandy’s.’
‘Of course you have.’
‘Why don’t you stay here till I get home?’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m all right, really. It’s a bore, that’s all.’
She finished her tea. Her hand was quite steady now. She brushed crumbs from her lap, got to her feet, and helped clear away the plates.
‘What’ll you do now?’ Mickey asked her, as they made their way down the Harrow Road.
Kay became a debutante again. She made a flighty gesture. ‘Oh, I’ve heaps of things.’
‘Have you, really?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I don’t believe you. Have a think about what I said—about coming to live with me. Will you? Or come out, some time! We could go for a drink. We could go to Chelsea. There’s no one there these days, the crowd’s all changed.’
‘All right,’ said Kay.
She got out her cigarettes again, took one for herself, gave one to Mickey, and tucked another behind one of Mickey’s boyish little ears. Mickey caught hold of her hand when she had done it, and gave it a squeeze; they stood for a second, smiling into each other’s eyes.
They had kissed once, Kay remembered—years ago, and without success. They’d both been drunk. They’d ended up laughing. That’s what happened, of course, when you were both, as it were, on the same side.
Mickey moved away. ‘Ta-ta, Kay,’ she said. Kay watched her running back to the garage. She saw her turn, once, to wave. Kay raised her hand, then started to walk, back in the direction of Bayswater.
She walked briskly, for as long as she thought that Mickey might be watching; but as soon as she’d turned a corner, she slowed her step. And when she got to Westbourne Grove and the street grew busy, she found a doorstep in the shadow of a broken wall, and sat down. She thought of what she’d said to Mickey, about standing in a crowd, stretching out her hand. And she studied the faces of the people as they passed, thinking, What did you lose? How about you? How do you bear it? What do you do?
I knew that girl from Enfield was trouble the second she walked in,’ Viv was saying, as she sprinkled Vim on the cloth. ‘They always are, that brassy type.’
She and Helen had just been about to take their lunches out to the fire-escape when they’d spotted pencil-marks on the lavatory wall.
A long and thin goes right in
But a short and thick does the trick!
somebody had written, on the paint above the roller-towel. Helen had not, for a second, known where to look. Viv seemed hardly less embarrassed. ‘This is what comes,’ she said now, rubbing madly, ‘of advertising in those local magazines.’
She stepped back, flushed and blinking. The wall was pale where she had cleaned it, but the words thick and does the trick! still showed, scored faintly into the paint. She rubbed again, then she and Helen moved about, narrowing their eyes, holding their heads at different angles to the light. They became aware, all at once, of what they were doing. They looked at each other and started to laugh.
‘Dear me,’ said Helen, biting her lip.
Viv rinsed out the cloth and put away the Vim, her shoulders shaking. She dried her hands, then lifted her knuckles to her eyes, afraid for her mascara. ‘Don’t!’ she said.
Still laughing, they opened the window and clambered out. They sat and unwrapped their sandwiches, sipped their tea, and grew calmer at last, then caught each other’s gaze and started laughing all over again.
Viv set down her spilling cup. ‘Oh, what would the clients think?’
Her mascara had run after all. She got out a handkerchief, made a twist of it, put the twist to the tip of her tongue, then held up a mirror and widened her eyes, rubbing beneath them almost as savagely, Helen thought, as she’d rubbed at the marks on the lavatory wall. The blood, in rushing into her face, had made her seem youthful. Her hair was disarranged by laughter; she looked tousled, full of life.
She tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve and picked up her sandwich; and her laughter faded into sighs. She put back a corner of the bread, and the sight of the vivid meat inside it—and the taste of it, when she’d bitten—seemed for some reason to subdue her. Her face lost its flush. Her eyes dried. She chewed very slowly, and finally put the sandwich down. She was wearing a cardigan over her dress, and began fastening up its buttons.
It was almost two weeks since that warm Saturday, when Helen had lain with Julia in Regent’s Park. That had been the last warm day of the summer, though they hadn’t known it then. The season had turned. The sun was moving in and out of clouds. Viv put back her head to look at the sky.
‘Not quite so warm today,’ she said.
‘No, not quite,’ said Helen.
‘I suppose we’ll all be complaining, soon, about the cold.’
Helen saw winter, drawing nearer, like a long dark tunnel on a railway line. She said, ‘It won’t be so cold as last year, will it?’
‘I hope not.’
‘It won’t be, surely!’
Viv rubbed her arms. ‘A man in the Evening Standard said our winters will go on getting colder and colder, and longer and longer; that in another ten years we’ll all be living like Eskimos.’
‘Eskimos!’ said Helen, picturing fur hats and wide, friendly faces; quite fancying the idea.
‘That’s what he said. He said it was something to do with the angle of the earth—that we’d knocked it off-balance with all those bombs. It makes sense, if you think about it. He said it served us all right.’
‘Oh,’ said Helen, ‘people in newspapers are always writing things like that. Do you remember someone, at the start of the war, saying the whole thing was a punishment on us for letting our king abdicate?’
‘Yes!’ said Viv. ‘I always thought that was a bit hard on everyone in France and Norway and places like that. I mean, it wasn’t their king, after all.’
She turned her head. The door to the wig-maker’s downstairs had opened, and a man had come out into the yard with a waste-paper basket under his arm. The basket was filled to overflowing with dark fibres—a mixture, probably, of netting and hair. Viv and Helen watched him cross to a dustbin, lift its lid, and empty the mess of fibres into it. Then he wiped his hands, and went back in. He didn’t look up. When the door was closed, Viv made a face.
But Helen was still thinking about the war. She took another little bite of her sandwich, then said, ‘Isn’t it odd, how everyone talks about the war as if it were a thing—oh, from years ago. It feels almost quaint. It’s as though we all got together in private and said to each other, “Now don’t, for God’s sake, let’s mention that!” When did that happen?’
Viv shrugged. ‘We all got tired of it, I suppose. We wanted to forget it.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I never would have thought we’d all forget it, though, so quickly. When it was on—Well, it was the only thing, wasn’t it? The only thing you talked about. The only thing that mattered. You tried to make other things matter, but it was always that, you always came back to that.’
‘Imagine if it started again,’ said Viv.
‘Christ!’ said Helen. ‘What an awful thought! It’d be an end to this place, anyway. Would you go back to your old job?’
Viv considered it. She had worked at the Ministry of Food, just around the corner in Portman Square. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe. It felt—important. I liked that. Even though all I was doing was typing, really…I had a good friend there, a girl called Betty; she was loads of fun. But she married a boy from Australia at the end of the war, and he took her back home. I envy her, now. If it really started again I might go into one of the services. I’d like to travel, get away.’ She looked wistful. Then, ‘How about you?’ she asked Helen. ‘Would you go back to your old job?’
‘I suppose so, though I was glad enough to leave it. It was funny work—a bit like this, in a way: unhappy people all expecting impossible things. You tried to do your best for them, but you got tired; or you had things of your own to think about. I don’t think I’d want to stay in London, though. London will get flattened, won’t it, when the next war comes? But then, everywhere will get flattened. It won’t be like last time. Even when things were so awful, right in the middle of the blitz, I wanted to stay—didn’t you? I hadn’t been here very long, yet I felt a sort of—a sort of loyalty to the city, I suppose. I didn’t want to let it down. It seems crazy, now! A loyalty to bricks and mortar! And then, of course, there were people I knew. I felt a loyalty to them, too. They were in London; and I wanted to be near them.’
‘People like Julia?’ asked Viv. ‘Were you friends with her, then? Was she in London, too?’
‘She was in London,’ said Helen, nodding; ‘but I only knew her at the end of the war. We shared a flat together, even then—a tiny little flat, in Mecklenburgh Square. I remember that flat so vividly! All the mismatched bits of furniture.’ She closed her eyes, recalling surfaces and scents. ‘It had boards across its window. It was falling down, really. There was a man upstairs, who used to pace and make the floor creak.’ She shook her head, opening her eyes. ‘I remember it clearer than anywhere else I ever lived; I don’t know why. We were only there for a year or so. For most of the war I was—’ She looked away again; picked up her sandwich. ‘Well, for most of it I was somewhere else.’
Viv waited. When Helen didn’t go on she said, ‘I lived in a boarding-house for Ministry girls. Down by the Strand.’
Helen looked up. ‘Did you? I didn’t know that. I thought you lived at home, with your father.’
‘I did at weekends. But during the week they liked to have us there, so we could get to work if the railways were hit. It was an awful place. So many girls! Everyone running up and down the stairs. Everyone pinching your lipstick and your stockings. Or someone would borrow your blouse or something, and when you got it back it was a different colour or a different shape, they’d dyed it or taken the sleeves off!’
She laughed. She moved her feet to a higher step on the metal ladder—drew up her knees, tucked in her skirt, rested her chin upon her fists. Then her laughter, as it had before, faded. Her gaze grew distant, serious. Here comes that curtain, Helen thought…But instead Viv said, ‘It’s funny, thinking back. It’s only a couple of years but, you’re right, it seems ages away. Some things were easier, then. There was a way of doing things, wasn’t there? Someone else had decided it for you, said that was the best way to do it; and that’s what you did. It got me down, at the time. I used to look forward to peace, to all the things I’d be able to do then. I don’t know what I thought those things would be. I don’t know what I thought would be different. You expect things to change, or people to change; but it’s silly, isn’t it? Because people and things don’t change. Not really. You just have to get used to them.’
Her expression, now, was so stripped, so solemn, Helen reached and touched her arm. ‘Viv,’ she said. ‘You look so awfully sad.’
Viv grew self-conscious again. She coloured, and laughed. ‘Oh, don’t mind me. I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself lately, that’s all.’
‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you happy?’
‘Happy?’ Viv blinked. ‘I don’t know. Is anybody happy? Really happy, I mean? People pretend they are.’
‘I don’t know, either,’ said Helen, after a moment. ‘Happiness is such a fragile sort of thing these days. It’s as though there’s only so much to go round.’
‘As if it’s on the ration.’
Helen smiled. ‘Yes, exactly! And so you know, when you’ve got some, that it’s going to run out soon; and that keeps you from enjoying it, you’re too busy wondering how you’re going to feel when it’s all gone. Or you start thinking about the person who’s had to go without so that you can have your portion.’
Her own mood sank, as she thought this. She began picking at blisters of paint on the metal platform, exposing fibres of rust beneath. She went on quietly, ‘Maybe it’s right, after all, what the newspaper prophets say: that one gets paid back in the way one deserves. Maybe we’ve all forfeited our right to happiness, by doing bad things, or by letting bad things happen.’
She looked at Viv. They’d never spoken to each other quite so freely before, and she realised, as if for the first time, just how fond she was of Viv, and how much she liked doing this—just this—sitting out here, talking, on this rusting metal platform. And she thought of something else. Were you friends with Julia then? Viv had asked lightly, before—as if it were the most natural thing in the world that Helen should have been; as if it were perfectly normal that Helen should have stayed in London, in a war, for a woman’s sake…
Her heart began to beat faster. She wanted, suddenly, to be able to confide in Viv. She wanted to, desperately! She wanted to say, Listen to me, Viv. I’m in love with Julia! It’s a marvellous thing, but terrible, too. Sometimes it makes a sort of child of me. Sometimes it feels like it’s almost killing me! It leaves me helpless. It makes me afraid! I can’t control it! Can that be right? Is it like this with other people? Has it ever been like this with you?
She felt her breath rising, until it seemed trapped in her chest. Her heart was beating wildly now, in her cheeks and fingertips. ‘Viv—’ she started.
But Viv had turned away. She’d put her hands to the pockets of her cardigan and, ‘Oh, heck,’ she said. ‘I’ve left my cigs inside. I’ll never get through the afternoon without one.’ She started to rise, seizing hold of the rail of the platform and making the whole thing rock. She said, ‘Will you give me a push up?’
Helen got to her feet more quickly. ‘I’m closer,’ she said. ‘I’ll get them.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, of course. It’ll only take a moment.’
Her breath still seemed to be crushed in her chest. She clambered awkwardly over the sill and landed with a thud beside the lavatory. There was still time, she thought, to say something. She wanted to more than ever now. And a cigarette would steady her nerves. She straightened her skirt. Viv called through the window: ‘They’re in my handbag!’
Helen nodded. She went quickly across the landing and up the short flight of stairs into the waiting-room. She kept her head down as she went, only glancing up at the last minute.
She found a man standing at Viv’s desk, looking idly over the papers.
She started so violently at the sight of him, she almost screamed. Startled himself, the man stepped back. Then he began to laugh. ‘Good Lord! Am I so terrifying as that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen, her hand at her breast. ‘I had no idea—But the office is closed.’
‘Is it? The door downstairs was open.’
‘Well, it really oughtn’t to have been.’
‘I just walked in and up the stairs. I did wonder where everyone was. I’m sorry to have frightened you, Miss—?’
He looked frankly into her face as he said this. He was young and well spoken, handsome, fair-haired, quite at his ease—so unlike their usual run of client that she felt at a disadvantage with him. She was aware of herself, breathless and flushed, her hair uncombed. She pictured Viv, too, waiting out on the fire-escape…Balls, she thought. But there was still time.
She calmed herself down, and turned to the diary on Viv’s desk. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You don’t have an appointment, I suppose?’ She ran her finger down the page. ‘You’re not Mr Tiplady?’
‘Mr Tiplady!’ He smiled. ‘No, I’m rather glad to say I’m not.’
‘The fact is, we don’t see anyone without an appointment.’
‘So I see.’ He had turned when she had, and was looking at the page over her shoulder. ‘You’re certainly doing a roaring trade. That’s thanks to the war, I suppose.’ He folded his arms and stood more easily. ‘Just out of interest, how much do you charge?’
Helen glanced at the clock. Go away. Go away! But she was too polite to let the thought show. ‘We charge in the first instance,’ she said, ‘a guinea—’
‘As much as that?’ He looked surprised. ‘And, what will my guinea get me? I suppose you show me an album of girls, do you? Or, you don’t actually bring the girls in?’
His manner had changed. He seemed really interested, yet was smiling, too, as if at some joke of his own. Helen grew cautious. It was just possible, she thought, that he was some kind of charming lunatic: one of those men—like Heath—driven insane by the mood of the times. She didn’t know whether or not to believe him about the door. Suppose he had forced it? She’d often thought how vulnerable she and Viv were, so close to Oxford Street and yet cut off, up here, from the bustle of the pavement.
‘I’m afraid I really can’t discuss it with you now,’ she said, her anxiety and impatience making her prim. ‘If you’d care to come back in ordinary hours, I’m sure my colleague’—she glanced involuntarily towards the stairs, the lavatory—‘will be happy to explain the whole procedure to you.’
But that seemed to pique his interest even more. ‘Your colleague,’ he said, as if seizing on the word, and following her gaze with his own; even lifting and weaving his head, and clicking his tongue against his lower lip, thoughtfully, as he did it. ‘I suppose your colleague’s not available right now, by any chance?’
‘I’m afraid we’re closed for lunch just now,’ said Helen firmly.
‘Yes, of course. You said that. What a pity.’ He said it vaguely. He was still gazing over at the stairs.
She turned a page in the diary. ‘If you could come back tomorrow at, say, four—’
But now he’d looked round, and realised what she was doing. His manner changed again. He almost laughed. ‘Look here, I’m sorry. I think I’ve given you the wrong impression.’
At that moment, Viv came up the stairs and into the office. She must have heard his voice after all, and wondered what was going on. She looked at him as if in amazement; and then, unaccountably, she blushed. Helen caught her eye, and made what she hoped was a little gesture of warning and alarm. She said, ‘I was just finding this gentleman an appointment. Apparently the door downstairs was open—’
The man, however, had stepped forward and begun to laugh. ‘Hello,’ he said, giving Viv a nod. Then he turned back to Helen. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said to her, in real apology, ‘I really did give you the wrong idea. It isn’t a wife I’m after, you see. Just Miss Pearce.’
Viv’s colour had deepened. She glanced at Helen as if nervous. She said, ‘This is Mr Robert Fraser, Helen, a friend of my brother’s. Mr Fraser, this is Miss Giniver…Is Duncan all right?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing like that,’ said the man easily. ‘Nothing at all. I was just passing, and thought I’d look in.’
‘Duncan asked you to come?’
‘I was just hoping you’d be free, to tell you the truth. It was just—Well, it was just a whim.’
He laughed again. There was a moment’s awkward silence. Helen thought of the little warning gesture she’d made to Viv a minute ago; and felt a fool. For everything had changed, suddenly. It was just as though someone had taken a piece of chalk and, swiftly but firmly, bent to the floor and drawn a line: a line that had Viv and this man, Robert Fraser, on one side, and herself on the other. She made a vague kind of movement. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I ought to get on.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said Viv quickly. Her eyelids fluttered. ‘I’ll—I’ll take Mr Fraser outside. Mr Fraser—?’
‘Of course,’ he said, moving with her towards the stairs. He nodded pleasantly to Helen as he went by. ‘Goodbye! I’m sorry to have disturbed you. If I ever change my mind about that wife, I’ll be sure to let you know!’
He went quickly down the staircase with a boyish irregular tread. When the door at the bottom was opened she heard him say to Viv, in a lower but carrying tone: ‘I’m afraid I’ve rather landed you in it—’
There was a thump, as the door was closed.
Helen kept still for a moment, then stepped into her office and got out her cigarettes; but threw the packet down, unopened. She felt more of a fool than ever, now. She recalled the way that, on first coming up the stairs from the lavatory, she’d almost screamed—like some comedy spinster in a play!
Just as she thought this she heard laughter, down in the street. She went to the window and looked out.
The window had had cheesecloth varnished to it at some point in the war; a few scraps of net and some scrapings of varnish remained stuck to the glass, distorting the view. But she could see clearly enough the top of Fraser’s head and his wide shoulders, lifting and tilting as he gestured and shrugged. And she could see, too, the curve of Viv’s pink cheek and the tip of her ear, the spread of her fingers on the sleeve of her folded arm.
She let her head sink, until her brow met the varnished glass. How easy it was, she thought unhappily, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt—they could kiss, make love, do anything at all—and the world indulged them. Whereas she and Julia—
She thought of what she’d been meaning to do, out on the fire-escape. I’m in love with Julia, she’d been going to say. And my love is almost killing me!
She couldn’t imagine saying it now. It seemed an absurd thing to say, now! She stood at the window, looking down, until she saw Fraser step forward to shake Viv’s hand, as if in farewell; then she moved quickly back to her desk and took up a folder of papers.
She heard the click of the latch being fastened on the street-door, and the sound of footsteps. Viv came slowly up the stairs and through the waiting-room. She stood in the doorway of Helen’s office. Helen didn’t raise her head. Viv was silent for a moment, then said awkwardly, ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for,’ said Helen, looking up at last and making herself smile. ‘He frightened the life out of me, though! Was the door really unlocked?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Well, then I suppose we can’t blame him for coming up.’
‘He just thought it would be all right to call in,’ said Viv. ‘I don’t know him at all, really. He turned up at my brother’s when I was there last week. We only talked for a little while. He knew my brother, ages ago. I don’t know why he should have come here.’
She’d started biting at one of her fingers, at the skin beside a nail. Her head was bowed, and her thick dark hair had slightly fallen across her face. Helen watched her for a second, then went back to picking through the papers in the folder.
At last Viv said, rather thinly, ‘Do you want to come back out, Helen?’
Helen looked up again. ‘Back outside? Do we have time?’ She looked at the clock. ‘Only ten minutes…I don’t know. Shall we?’
‘Well,’ said Viv, ‘not if you don’t want to.’
They gazed at each other, as if meaning to speak; but the moment for confidences had passed. Helen shuffled the papers. ‘I ought to look these over, I suppose,’ she said.
And, ‘Yes,’ said Viv, at once. ‘Yes, all right.’
She stood in Helen’s doorway a little longer, as if she might say more; then she went out to the waiting-room. Soon there came the sound of her straightening up the magazines on the table, shaking out the sofa cushions.
Everyone has their secrets, after all, Helen thought. The thought depressed her, horribly. It made her think of Julia. She put the papers down and sat at her desk, with her head in her hands, her eyes closed. If only Julia were here, right now! She began to long for the sound of Julia’s voice, for the comforting touch of her hand. What would she be doing, at this sort of hour? Helen tried to visualise her. She pressed her hands into the sockets of her eyes and sent her thoughts across the streets of Marylebone until she had a sense of Julia’s presence, fantastically vivid and real. She saw her sitting in her study at home: silent, solitary, perhaps bored or restless, perhaps thinking of Helen herself. She began to miss Julia so badly, the missing felt like an ache or a sickness. She opened her eyes, and saw the telephone. But she oughtn’t to call, in a mood like this. She wouldn’t do it, anyway, with Viv so close, able to overhear every word; and she couldn’t bring herself to go tiptoeing across the floor and silently close her office door.
If Viv goes down to the lavatory, she thought, I’ll do it. Only then.
She sat tensely, listening as Viv brushed dust from the carpet and rearranged chairs. Then she heard heels on the staircase, fading. Viv must have taken the teapot down to the basin to rinse out the leaves.
At once, she picked up the telephone and dialled.
There was a tinny electric burr. She imagined the telephone on Julia’s desk, beginning to ring; imagined Julia giving a start, putting down her pen, lifting her hand—holding it, perhaps, for a moment or two, above the receiver, because of course everyone preferred to let a telephone ring a little than answer it at once. But the ringing went on. Perhaps Julia was downstairs in the kitchen; or down on the floor below that, in the lavatory. Now Helen saw her running up the narrow stairs to her study, in her flapping espadrille slippers; she saw her tucking back a lock of hair that had come bouncing out from behind her ear, reaching breathlessly for the phone…
Still the ringing went on. Maybe Julia, after all, had decided not to answer. Helen had known her do that, when she was in the middle of writing a scene. But if she guessed it was Helen calling, then surely she’d pick the receiver up? If Helen would only let the thing ring for long enough, Julia would realise, Julia would answer.
Burr, burr. Burr, burr. The hateful noise went on and on. At last, after almost a minute, Helen put the receiver down—unable to bear the image of the telephone shrieking, forlorn and abandoned, in her own empty house.
I haven’t got long,’ said Viv, looking up and down Oxford Street.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ answered Fraser, ‘to spare me any time at all.’
It was just after six. She had told him, at lunch-time, to come back, and had met him here, in front of the wrecked John Lewis building. She was anxious that Helen might still be about, and might see them; but when he saw her glancing nervously around, he misunderstood. The pavement was filled with people going briskly home from work or queueing for buses, and he thought she was bothered by the crowd. He said, ‘No, we can’t talk here, can we? Let me take you to a café, somewhere quiet.’ He touched her arm.
But she said she didn’t have time for that; that she was meeting someone in forty-five minutes, in another part of town. So they walked, instead, around the corner to one of the benches in Cavendish Square. The bench was covered with fallen leaves, golden and glossy as scraps of yellow mackintosh. He swept them away so that she could sit.
She sat rather rigidly, with her hands in her pockets and her coat buttoned up. When he offered her a cigarette she shook her head. He put the cigarettes away and took out a pipe.
She watched him thumbing in the tobacco. He was like a kid, she thought, mucking about. She said, without smiling, ‘I wish you hadn’t come to my office today, Mr Fraser. I don’t know what Miss Giniver thought.’
‘She looked as though she thought I was going to fling her to the floor and ravish her, to tell you the truth!’ he said. And then, when Viv wouldn’t smile: ‘I’m sorry. It just seemed the most straightforward way to see you.’
‘I still don’t know why you felt you needed to see me at all. Has my brother done something to you?’
‘It’s nothing like that.’
‘He didn’t ask you to come?’
‘It’s just as I told you earlier on. Your brother had nothing to do with it. He doesn’t even know I’m here. He only mentioned to me, in passing, where you work. But he speaks so warmly of you. It’s clear’—he held a flame to the pipe, sucking on the stem of it—‘it’s clear you mean a great deal to him. It was the just the same, I remember, when we were in prison.’
He made no attempt to muffle the word, and Viv flinched. He saw, and lowered his voice. ‘It was the same, I should have said, when I first knew him. He used to look forward to your visits more than to anything else in the world.’
She looked away. At the words ‘your visits’ she’d had a very clear and unpleasant memory of herself, her father, and Duncan at one of the tables in the visiting-room at Wormwood Scrubs. She remembered the press of other visitors, the look of the men, the awful babble, the sour, airless feel of the room. She remembered Fraser himself from those days, too—for she’d seen him, more than once. She recalled his brash public-schoolboy’s laugh; she remembered one of the other visitors saying, ‘Isn’t it a shame?’ and a man actually calling out to him: ‘Can’t you take it, conchy?’ She’d felt rather sorry for him, then. She’d thought him brave, but brave in a pointless kind of way. He hadn’t changed anything, after all. She’d felt more sympathy for his parents. She could still picture his mother, at the scratched prison table: a smart, kind, softly spoken woman, dreadfully wounded-looking and pale.
Duncan, of course, even then, had thought Fraser marvellous. He thought anyone marvellous who could talk cleverly, in a well-bred voice. Viv had arrived at Mr Mundy’s on Tuesday night, and he had come to let her in, his dark eyes flashing with excitement. ‘Guess who I met! You never will! He’s coming round here, later on.’ He’d sat listening out for Fraser, all evening; and when, a little later, Fraser had actually turned up, he’d leapt to his feet and gone rushing to the door…
It had all filled Viv with dismay. She and Mr Mundy had sat, uncomfortable, self-conscious, hardly knowing where to look.
Now she watched Fraser fiddling about with the pipe, and said, ‘I still don’t know what it is you want me to do.’
He laughed. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, neither do I.’
‘You said you’re writing for a newspaper or something like that. You’re not going to write about Duncan, are you?’
He looked as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’
‘Because if that’s what all this is about—’
‘It’s not “about” anything at all. How suspicious you are!’ He began to laugh again. But when she still looked grave, he put back his hair, and changed his tone.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know it’s queer, my coming along out of the blue like this. I suppose it seems odd to you, my taking an interest in your brother after so long. I don’t quite know myself why I should feel so strongly about it. It was just, coming across him so suddenly at the candle-works that time; thinking of somebody like him having to work in a place like that! And then—my God! Seeing him with Mr Mundy! I couldn’t believe it. He’d told me where he was living and I thought he was joking! I can’t tell you the start it gave me, the first time he took me to the house. I’ve been back there since, two or three times, and it still unnerves me. Has your brother really been there ever since his release? Right from the day he got out? It seems incredible.’
‘It’s what he wanted,’ said Viv. She added: ‘Mr Mundy’s been very kind.’
It sounded feeble, even to her. Fraser raised his eyebrows. ‘He’s certainly got things nice and cosy. I’m just thinking back, to when we were inside. He was plain Mr Mundy then, of course. There was none of this “Uncle Horace” business. I thought I was hearing things, the first time I heard that!’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘Don’t your family mind?’
‘Why should they?’
‘I don’t know. It seems an odd sort of life, that’s all, for a boy like Duncan. He’s not even a boy any more, is he? And yet it’s impossible to think of him as anything else. He might have got stuck. I think he has got stuck. I think he’s made himself be stuck, as a way of—of punishing himself, for all that happened, years ago, all that he did and didn’t do…I think Mr Mundy is taking very good care to keep him stuck; and—if you don’t mind my saying so—after seeing the way you were with him on Tuesday night, I don’t think anyone else is doing anything to, as it were, unstick him. All that fascination of his with things from the past, for instance.’
‘That’s just a hobby,’ said Viv.
‘It’s a pretty morbid one, don’t you think? For a boy like him?’
She lost her patience suddenly. ‘“A boy like him,”’ she said. ‘“A boy like him.” People have always said that about Duncan, ever since he was little. “A boy like him shouldn’t be at a school like this, he’s too sensitive for it.” “A boy like him should go to college.”’
Fraser frowned at her. ‘Did it occur to you that those people might have been saying it because it was true?’
‘Of course it was true! But what was the point of it? And look where it got him! We had to deal with all that, Mr Fraser—my family and I, not you. Four years, going back and forth to that awful place. Four years, and more, fretting about it. It nearly killed my father! Perhaps if Duncan had been like you when he was young—had the things you had, I mean, the same sort of people around him, the same sort of start—perhaps things would have been different. He went to Mr Mundy’s when he came out because he felt he’d nowhere else. Where were you, then? If you’re so big a friend of his, where were you?’
Fraser looked away, lowered the pipe, turned it in his fingers, and didn’t answer. She went on more quietly, ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. But I can’t help thinking your coming along like this—Well, what’s it going to do? When Duncan told me he’d met you, I’ll be quite honest with you, I wished he hadn’t. What’s the good of it? It’s not going to get him anywhere. It’s just going to give him ideas again; it’s just going to stir things up and upset him.’
He was fishing for matches, and spoke stiffly. ‘You could let him decide that for himself, of course.’
‘But you know what he’s like. You said, just now. He’s got a sort of—a sort of wisdom about some things; but in so many ways he’s still more or less a boy. He can be pushed into things, like a boy can. He can be—’
She stopped. Fraser had the box of matches in his hand but had turned, and was looking at her. ‘What do you think,’ he asked her slowly, ‘I’m going to push him into?’
She swallowed, and dropped her gaze. ‘I don’t know.’
He went on, ‘You’re thinking of that boy, aren’t you? The boy who died? Alec?’ And then, when she looked up, he nodded. ‘Yes. You see, I know all about him…You don’t think I’m like him, though, surely?’ She didn’t answer. He coloured, as if angry. ‘Is that what you think? Because if you do—Well, I could give you a list of girls, you know, who could put you straight on that!’
He said it seriously, but then must have caught the earnestness in his own voice. He blushed harder, put his hand again to his hair, and ducked his head. The gesture, unstudied and a little gauche, was the most appealing thing he’d done. She let herself see, for the first time, how nice-looking he was, how smooth and unmarked. He was young, after all: younger than her.
He still had the pipe and the matches in his hand, but was sitting still, with his hands slackly in his lap. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I only wanted to see you as a way of helping your brother.’
‘Well, I think you might help him best just by leaving him alone.’
‘But, is that really what you’d like? To just leave him there, living with Mr Mundy in that peculiar way?’
‘There’s nothing peculiar about it!’
‘Are you quite sure?’ He held her gaze; and when she looked away he said slowly, ‘No, you’re not, are you? I saw it in your face, last week. And what about that job, that factory? You want to see him working at it for the rest of his life? Making night lights, for nurseries?’
‘People work in factories; it doesn’t matter what they make. My father’s worked in a factory for thirty years!’
‘Is that any reason your brother should?’
‘So long as he’s happy,’ she said. ‘That’s what you don’t seem to understand. I just want Duncan to be happy. We all do.’
Her words, as before, sounded weak. And she knew, in her heart, that he was right. She knew that part of the reason she’d been so dismayed to see him arrive at Mr Mundy’s last week was that she’d looked at the house with him in it, and seen it all as if through his eyes…But she was tired. She said to herself, as she always ended up saying to herself, about Duncan—It’s not my fault. I did my best. I’ve got my own problems to think about.
And even as these words glided familiarly into her mind, she heard the quarter hour struck out on a nearby clock, and remembered the time.
‘Mr Fraser—’
‘Oh, call me Robert, will you?’ he said, beginning to smile again. ‘I’m sure your brother would want you to. I certainly do.’
So she said, ‘Robert—’
‘And may I call you Vivien? Or—what Duncan calls you—Viv?’
‘If you like,’ she said, feeling herself blush. ‘I really don’t care. It’s kind of you to try and help Duncan like this. But the fact is, I can’t talk about it now. I haven’t got time.’
‘No time for your brother?’
‘I’ve got time for my brother; but not for this.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘You don’t think much of my motives, do you?’
She said, ‘I still don’t know what your motives are.’ And she added: ‘I’m not sure you do.’
That made him colour slightly again. For a moment they sat in silence, both of them blushing. Then she changed her pose, getting ready to go, putting her hands into the pockets of her coat. The pockets had old bus tickets in them, stray coins and paper wrappers—but then her fingers found something else: that little parcel of cloth, with the heavy gold ring inside it.
Her heart gave a jolt. She stood up, abruptly. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Fraser.’
‘Robert,’ he corrected, getting to his feet.
‘I’m sorry, Robert.’
‘That’s all right. I ought to go, too. But, look here. I don’t like you misunderstanding me. Let me walk with you and we can talk as we go.’
‘I’d really rather—’
‘Which way are you going?’
She didn’t want to tell him. He saw her hesitate, and chose to take it, she supposed, as an invitation. When she started to walk he walked alongside her; once his arm brushed hers, and he made a show of apologising and moving further away. But an odd thing had happened between them. Somehow, in letting him go with her, she’d managed to put their relationship on a subtly different footing. As they headed back to Oxford Street they had to pause at a kerb alongside a window; she saw the two of them reflected in it, and met his gaze through the glass. He started to smile, seeing what she did: that they looked like a couple—a simple, nice-looking, young courting couple.
His manner changed. As they wove through the traffic at Oxford Circus he struggled to keep up with her and said, in a different tone from any he’d used with her yet, ‘You know where you’re going, anyway. I like that in a woman. Are you meeting a girlfriend?’
She shook her head.
‘A boyfriend, then?’
‘It’s nobody,’ she said, to shut him up.
‘You’re meeting nobody? Well, that shouldn’t take long, in a town like this…Look, you’ve got me all wrong, you know. What do you say to us starting again—this time, with a drink?’
They had drawn near a pub on the edge of Soho. She shook her head and kept going. ‘I can’t.’
He touched her arm. ‘Not just for twenty minutes?’
She felt the pressure of his fingers, and slowed, and met his gaze. He looked young and earnest again. She said, ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. There’s something I’ve got to do.’
‘Couldn’t I do it with you?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘Well, I could wait.’
The awkwardness must have shown on her face. He looked around, at a loss. He said, ‘Where the hell are you making for, anyway? Your evening job in a leg-show? You don’t need to be bashful, if that’s what it is. You’ll find me a broadminded sort of bloke. I could sit in the audience and keep off the rowdies.’ He pushed back his long hair, and smiled. ‘Let me go a bit further with you, at least. I couldn’t think of myself as a gentleman, and leave you on your own in streets like these.’
She hesitated, and then, ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m going to the Strand. You can come with me, if you really want to, as far as Trafalgar Square.’
He bowed. ‘Trafalgar Square it is.’
He offered her his arm. She didn’t want to take it, then thought of the minutes ticking by. She put her hand, lightly, in the crook of his elbow, and they moved off together. His arm was amazingly firm to the touch, the muscles shifting, beneath her fingers, with the rhythm of his walk.
As he’d hinted, the streets they were entering now were rather sleazy ones: a mixture of boarded-up houses and fenced-off ground, depressed-looking nightclubs, pubs, and Italian cafés. The smell was of rotting vegetables, brick-dust, garlic, parmesan cheese; here and there an open doorway or window let out the blare of music. Yesterday she’d come this way on her own and a man had plucked at her arm and said in a phoney New York accent, ‘Hey, Bombshell, how much for a grind?’ He’d meant it as a sort of compliment, too. But tonight men looked but called nothing, because they assumed she was Fraser’s girl. It was half amusing, half annoying. She noticed it more, perhaps, because she was unused to it. She never came anywhere like this with Reggie. They never went to nightclubs or restaurants. They only ever went from one lonely place to another; or they sat in his car with the radio on. She thought of bumping into somebody she knew, and grew nervous. Then she realised she had nothing to be nervous of.
While they walked, Fraser spoke about Duncan. He spoke as if he and she were agreed on the whole issue; as if all they had to do was put their heads together, spend a little time on it, and they’d be able to sort Duncan out. They had to do something, for a start, he said, about his job at that factory. He had a friend who worked in a printing-shop in Shoreditch; he thought this friend might be able to find Duncan a place, learning the trade. Or he knew another man who ran a bookshop. The pay would be negligible, but maybe that sort of work would appeal to Duncan more. Did she think it would?
She frowned, not really listening; still aware of the ring in its parcel in her pocket; conscious of the time. ‘Why don’t you ask Duncan,’ she said at last, ‘instead of me?’
‘I wanted your opinion on it, that’s all. I thought we might—Well, I hoped we’d be friends. If nothing else, we’ll be bound to run into each other again at Mr Mundy’s, and—’
They had reached the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square, and begun to slacken their pace. Viv turned her head, searching for a clock. When she looked back into Fraser’s face she found him gazing at her with an odd expression.
‘What?’ she said.
He smiled. ‘You look so like your brother sometimes. You looked like him just then. You really are remarkably like him, aren’t you?’
‘You said that at Mr Mundy’s.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘It’s one of those things, I suppose, that you can’t really see for yourself.’ She caught sight of the clock on St Martin’s church: twenty to seven. ‘Now, I really must go.’
‘All right. But, just a minute.’
He fished about in his jacket pocket and got out a piece of paper and a pencil. He quickly wrote something down: the telephone number of the house he was living in. ‘You’ll give me a call,’ he said, as he handed it over, ‘if you ever want to talk to me, in private? Not just about your brother, I mean.’ He smiled. ‘About other things, too.’
‘Yes,’ she said, stuffing the paper in her pocket. ‘Yes, all right. I—’ She gave him her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Fraser. I’ve got to go, now. Goodbye!’
And she turned and left him, went hurriedly across the rest of the square without looking back. Probably he stood and watched her running, wondering who on earth she was meeting, and why; she didn’t care. She ran on, through a break in the traffic, and headed into the Strand.
The evenings were drawing in at last. The street was darker than it had been when she’d driven through it that time with Reggie: the thickness of the twilight gave everyone flat, featureless faces and she found herself peering at people, as she hurried, with a mixture of frustration, excitement, dread. It wasn’t true, what she’d told Fraser. She didn’t have an appointment to keep. She was looking for Kay, that was all. This was the fifth or sixth time she’d come here in the past two weeks. She was hoping to see her; just hoping to pick her out of the crowd…
She drew close to the Tivoli cinema, keeping to the north side of the street, where the view was widest. She slowed her step, then moved into a doorway, out of the way.
She must have looked crazy to anyone watching, gazing so keenly from face to face. She kept seeing figures she thought were Kay’s; she kept moving forward, her heart thudding. But each time, as they drew nearer, the figures turned out to be not Kay at all, turned out to be wildly unlikely people, teenage boys or middle-aged men.
The cinema queue dwindled. The programme, she guessed, must have already begun. But there’d be the news-films first, and then, say, Mickey Mouse. Maybe it was silly, standing here. She might have missed Kay already. All that mucking about with Fraser! She tapped her foot. Perhaps she should cross over, buy a ticket, go inside; go up and down the aisles; or find a spot where she could watch the latecomers, more closely, as they came in.
But then, she thought suddenly, what was the point? Was it really likely that Kay would come back here? She might have come just that one time, for that one film. She could be anywhere in London! What were Viv’s chances of seeing her, really?
The queue had shrunk to nothing now. A group of boys and girls came hurrying up to the doors, and that was it. Viv put her hand again to her pocket, feeling the ring in its bit of cloth, turning it over and over with her fingers, knowing it was stupid to keep waiting, but not wanting to leave, unable just to give it up, go home—
Then a man’s voice sounded, close beside her.
‘Still looking for nobody, I suppose?’
She jumped. It was Fraser.
‘God!’ she said. ‘What do you want, now?’
He put up his hands. ‘I don’t want anything! I’ve been sitting where you left me—in Trafalgar Square, watching the pigeons. Awfully soothing on a bloke’s nerves, those pigeons. I found myself quite losing track of time. Then I thought I’d be like Burlington Bertie, and walk down the Strand. I didn’t expect to find you still here, honestly. And I can see by your face just how welcome I am. Don’t worry, you’ll find I’m quite the gentleman in matters like this. I won’t hang about, and spoil your chances with the other bloke.’
She was looking over his shoulder, still scanning the faces of passers-by. Then she took in what he’d said—and the contrast between what he was thinking and the real reason she was here seemed, all at once, to defeat her. She lowered her head and said, ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway. The person’s not coming.’
‘Not coming? How do you know?’
‘I just do,’ she said bitterly. ‘It was stupid, my waiting here at all.’
She turned away. He put out his hand, just touched her arm. ‘Look here,’ he said quietly, seriously. ‘I’m sorry.’
She drew in her breath. ‘I’m all right.’
‘You don’t look all right. Let me take you in somewhere, get you a drink—’
‘You mustn’t trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘You must have somewhere to be, don’t you?’
He looked rueful. ‘Well, as it happens, I said I’d look in on your brother, at Mr Mundy’s. He won’t mind waiting an extra hour, though, I’m sure. Come on.’
He drew at her arm. She’d gone back to looking up and down the street; she couldn’t help it. But she let him lead her along the pavement. He said, ‘There’s a pub just up there.’
She shook her head. ‘Not a pub.’
‘Not a pub, all right. A café? Here’s one, look, with a window on the street. We’ll go in here. And then, if your friend turns up after all…’
They went into the café and found a table near the door. He ordered coffees, a plate of cakes. And when, after a few minutes, another table became free, right next to the window, he moved her to that.
The café was busy. The door kept opening and closing as people passed in and out. From behind the counter there came the regular clatter of crockery, the hiss of steam. Viv kept her head turned to the street. Fraser sometimes looked with her; more often, though, he kept his gaze on her face. He said once, to try and make her laugh, ‘I’ve changed my mind about you. I don’t think you work in a leg-show at all. I think you’re a private detective. Am I close to the mark?’
She let her coffee sit in front of her and grow cool. The cakes arrived, nasty-looking things, the colour of luminous paint in daylight, each with a swirl of artificial cream on top, already turning back to water. She wasn’t hungry. She still kept seeing, from the corner of her eye, people she thought might be Kay. She almost forgot about Fraser; she was vaguely aware that he’d fallen silent, that was all…But after another few minutes he spoke again; and his voice, this time, was quite flat.
He said, ‘You know, I hope he’s worth it.’
Viv looked at him, not understanding. ‘Who?’
‘This guy you’re waiting for. From where I’m sitting, to tell you the truth, it rather looks as though he isn’t. Since he’s put you to all this trouble—’
‘You think it’s a he, of course,’ she said, turning back to the window. ‘It’s like a man, to think that.’
‘Well, isn’t it a he?’
‘No. If you must know, it’s a woman.’
He didn’t believe her at first. But she could see him thinking it over. And then he leant back, nodding, and his expression changed. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. The wife.’
He said it in such a cynical, knowing sort of way; and his comment was so far from the truth—yet in another way, so near it—that Viv felt stung. She wondered what Duncan might have told him, about her and Reggie. Her face grew warm. She said, ‘It’s not—it’s not what you’re thinking.’
He spread his hands. ‘I told you before, I’m a broadminded bloke.’
‘But, it’s nothing like that. It’s just—’
His eyes were on her. They were blue, still rather knowing but, apart from that, quite guileless; and as she gazed into them it struck her that he was the first person, in what must have been years and years, to whom she’d spoken for more than about a minute without telling some sort of lie. When the café door opened and a couple of boys came in and started joking with the man behind the counter, she said quietly, under cover of their laughter, ‘I saw someone here. I saw someone here, the week before last; and I’ve been hoping to see her again. That’s all it is.’
He could tell she was serious. He moved closer to the table again and said, ‘A friend?’
She looked down. ‘Just a woman. A woman I knew once, when the war was on.’
‘And you made an arrangement with her, for tonight?’
‘No. I just saw her there, outside the cinema. I’ve been back, and waited, on different nights. I thought, if I did that—’ She grew self-conscious. ‘It sounds barmy, doesn’t it? I know it does. It is barmy. But, you see, when I saw her here, before, I sort of—ran away. Then I wished I hadn’t. She was kind to me once. She was terribly kind. She did something for me.’
‘You lost touch with her?’ Fraser asked, in the little silence that followed. ‘That happened all the time in wartime.’
‘It wasn’t that. I could have found out where she was if I’d wanted to; it would have been easy. But what she’d done for me, you see, made me think of something else, that I didn’t want to remember.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s stupid really, because of course I remembered it, anyway.’
He didn’t press her to tell him more. They sat with the silly-looking cakes between them; he stirred the remains of his cooling coffee as if thinking over her words. Then he said, still rather musingly, ‘Wartime is a time of kindness. We all tend to forget. I’ve worked with people in the past few months, people who’ve come here from Germany and Poland. Their stories—God! They told me terrible things, atrocious things; things I couldn’t believe an ordinary man, in ordinary clothes, in the world I knew, could be telling me…But they told me marvellous things, too. The courage of people, the impossible goodness. I think it was having heard stories like that that made me, when I saw your brother again—I don’t know. He was kind to me, in prison; I can tell you that. Just as it sounds like your friend, this woman, was kind to you.’
Viv said, ‘She wasn’t even a friend, really. We were strangers.’
‘Well, sometimes it’s easier to be kinder to strangers than to the people we’re closest to. She might have forgotten you, though—have you thought of that? Or she might not want to be reminded. Are you even sure it’s her?’
‘It’s her,’ said Viv. ‘I know it is. I just know. And yes, perhaps she has forgotten me, and perhaps I oughtn’t to bother her. It’s just—I can’t explain it. It just seems the right thing to do.’ She looked at him, suddenly afraid she’d said too much. She wanted to say: ‘You won’t tell Duncan?’ But what would that do, but make yet another secret?—a secret between him and her? You had to trust someone, after all; and perhaps he was right, and it was easiest to trust strangers…So she said nothing. She reached for one of the cakes and began to crumble it up. Then she turned her head, and gazed out into the street. She gazed idly, now, not looking for Kay; still sure, in her heart, that she’d had that single chance and lost it.
And even before her gaze had settled a figure came sauntering along the pavement from the direction of Waterloo Bridge: a slim, tall, quite striking figure, not at all like a boy or a middle-aged man, with its hands in its trouser pockets and a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from its lip…Viv moved closer to the window. Fraser saw, and leant to look, too.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘You haven’t seen her? Which one are you looking at? Not the tailored type, with the swagger?’
‘Don’t!’ said Viv, moving back, reaching across the table to pull him back with her. ‘She’ll see.’
‘I thought that was the point! What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you going to go over?’
She’d lost her nerve. ‘I don’t know. Shall I?’
‘After you’ve put me through all this?’
‘It’s so long ago. She’ll think I’m crackers.’
‘But you want to, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go on, then! What are you waiting for?’
Again, it was the youth and the excitement in his blue eyes that made her do it. She got to her feet, and went out of the café; she ran across the street and reached Kay’s side just as Kay herself had reached the cinema’s swing doors. She took out the ring, in its cloth, from her pocket; and just touched Kay’s arm…
It only took a minute or two. It was the easiest thing she’d ever done. But she came back to the café feeling elated. She sat, and smiled and smiled. Fraser watched her, smiling too.
‘Did she remember you?’
Viv nodded.
‘Was she pleased to see you?’
‘I’m not sure. She seemed—different. I suppose everyone’s different from how they were in those days.’
‘Will you see her again? Are you glad you did it?’
‘Yes,’ said Viv. Then she said it again. ‘Yes, I’m glad I did it.’
She looked back over at the cinema. There was no sign of Kay now. But her feeling of elation persisted. She felt capable of anything! She finished her coffee, her mind racing. She was thinking of all the things she could do. She could give up her job! She could leave Streatham, take a little flat all to herself! She could call up Reggie! Her heart jumped. She could find a telephone box, right now. She could call him up and tell him—what? That she was through with him, for ever! That she forgave him; but that forgiving wasn’t enough…The possibilities made her giddy. Maybe she’d never do any of these things. But oh, how marvellous it was, just to know that she could!
She put down her cup and started to laugh. Fraser laughed, too. His smile had a frown mixed up in it; and as he looked her over, he shook his head.
‘How extraordinarily like your brother you are!’ he said.
The house, when Helen got home that night, was empty. She stood in the hall, calling Julia’s name; but became aware, even as she was calling, of a sort of deadness to the place. The lights were off; the stove and kettle, up in the kitchen, were quite cold. Her first, wild, idiotic thought was, Julia’s gone; and she went with a feeling of dread into their bedroom and slowly drew back the wardrobe door, certain that Julia’s clothes would have all been cleared away…She did this before she’d taken her own coat off, and when she saw that Julia’s clothes were still there; that none of her suitcases was missing; that her hairbrush and jewellery and cosmetics were all still scattered on top of the dressing-table, she sat awkwardly down on the bed and shook with relief.
You bloody idiot, she said to herself, almost laughing.
But then, where was Julia? Helen went back to the wardrobe. After a little calculation she worked out that Julia had gone out in one of her smartish dresses and one of her nicer coats. She’d taken her decent-looking bag, as opposed to her scuffed one. She might have gone to visit her parents, Helen thought. She might be out with her literary agent or her publisher. She might be with Ursula Waring, said a gnomish voice, from a dark, grubby corner of Helen’s mind; but Helen wouldn’t listen to that. Julia would be out with her editor or agent; probably her agent had rung up at the last minute, as he often did, and asked her to run into the office and sign some paper—something like that.
If that were the case, of course, Julia would have left a note. Helen got up and took her coat off—quite calm, now—and began to look around the house. She went back to the kitchen. Beside the pantry, hanging up from a nail, they kept a hinged brass hand with scraps of paper clasped in it, for writing lists and messages on; but all the messages gripped in it now were old ones. She searched the floor, in case a scrap of paper had fallen out. She looked on the kitchen counters and shelves and, finding nothing, began to look in all sorts of other, improbable places: in the bathroom, under the cushions on the sofa, in the pockets of one of Julia’s cardigans. At last she could feel her searching taking on an edge of panic or compulsion. Again that grubby voice rose inside her, just pointed out to her that here she was, picking her way through bits of dust like an imbecile, when all the time Julia was out with Ursula Waring or some other woman, laughing at the very thought of her—
She had to thrust this voice back down. It was like pressing down the spring of a grinning jack-in-the-box. But she wouldn’t give in to thoughts like that. It was seven o’clock, an ordinary evening, and she was hungry. Everything was perfectly all right. Julia had gone out without expecting to be so late. Julia had been delayed, that was all. People got delayed, for God’s sake, all the time! She decided to start cooking their dinner. She gathered together the ingredients for a shepherd’s pie. She said to herself that by the time the pie had gone into the oven, Julia would be home.
She put the wireless on as she cooked, but kept the volume very low; and all the time that she boiled water, fried the mince, mashed the potato, she stood quite tensely, listening out for the sound of Julia’s key being put into the lock of the door downstairs.
When the dish was ready, she didn’t know whether to keep on waiting for Julia or not. She served it up on two plates; she put the plates to keep warm in the oven, and slowly did all the washing-up and the drying. Surely by the time she’d finished that, Julia would be back, and they could sit down and eat together? By now she was starving. When the washing-up was done she got her plate back out, put it to rest on top of the stove, and began to pick at the potato with a fork. She only meant to eat a morsel or two, just to blunt her hunger; she ended up eating the whole thing—eating it like that, standing up, with her pinnie on, with the steam running down the kitchen window, and the man and the woman, out in the yard, starting up a fresh argument, or a new version of an old one.
‘Work it up your arse!’
She’d been so long in the bright kitchen, when she went out into the rest of the house she found it gloomy. She moved swiftly from room to room, turning on lights. She went down to the sitting-room and poured herself a glass of gin and water. She sat on the sofa and got out her knitting; she knitted for five or ten minutes. But the wool seemed to catch at her dry fingers. The gin was souring her mood, making her clumsy, unsettling her. She threw the knitting down and got to her feet. She wandered back up to the kitchen, still looking, vaguely, for some sort of note. She reached the bottom of the narrow staircase leading up to Julia’s study. The urge came over her to go up there.
There was no reason, she thought, as she climbed the stairs, for feeling self-conscious about it. Julia had never said, for example, that she would prefer it if Helen left her study alone. The subject had never arisen between them; on the contrary, there were times when Julia had gone out to some meeting or other and had telephoned to say, ‘I’m sorry, Helen, I’ve been an idiot and left a paper behind. Would you mind running up to my room and fishing it out?’ That showed she didn’t mind the thought of Helen going through the drawers of her desk; and certainly, though the drawers had keys to them, the keys were never turned.
Still, there was something furtive, something troubling, about visiting Julia’s study when Julia wasn’t there. It was like going alone to your parents’ bedroom when you were a child: you suspected that things went on there—precise, unguessable things, that were both about you and yet excluded you utterly…So Helen felt, anyway. She’d feel this even while, as now, she was simply standing in the room—not lifting up papers or peering gingerly into unsealed envelopes, just standing still in the middle of the room and looking around.
The room took up almost all of the attic floor. It was dim, quiet, with sloping ceilings—a real writer’s garret, she and Julia liked to joke. The walls were a pale shade of olive; the carpet was a genuine Turkey rug, only slightly worn. A desk like a bank-manager’s, and a swivel chair, were in front of one of the windows; an aged leather sofa was in front of the other—for Julia wrote in bursts, and in between liked to doze or read. A table at the sofa’s end held dirty cups and glasses, a saucer of biscuit crumbs, an ashtray, ash. The cups and stubs of cigarettes had Julia’s lipstick on them. A tumbler had a smudge left by her thumb. Everywhere, in fact, there were bits of Julia—Julia’s dark hairs on the sofa cushions and the floor; her kicked-off espadrilles beneath the desk; a clipping of nail beside the waste-paper basket, an eyelash, powder from her cheek.
If I were to hear, Helen said to herself, that Julia had died today, I’d come in here, in exactly this way, and all this rubbish would be the stuff of tragedy. As it was, she gazed from thing to thing and felt the chafing within her of a familiar but uneasy mix of emotions: fondness, annoyance, and fear. She thought of the haphazard way in which Julia had used to write, in that studio flat in Mecklenburgh Square she’d been describing to Viv, today, on the fire-escape. She remembered lying on a divan bed while Julia worked at a rickety table by the light of a single candle—her hand, as it rested on the page, seeming to cradle the flame, her palm a mirror, her handsome face lit up…She would come to bed at last, after writing for hours like that, and lie tired out but sleepless, distracted and remote; Helen would sometimes softly lay a hand on her forehead and seem to be able to feel the words jostling and buzzing about behind it like so many bees. She didn’t mind. She almost liked it. Because the novel after all was only a novel; the people in it weren’t real; it was she, Helen, who was real, she who was able to lie at Julia’s side like that and touch her brow…
She moved closer to Julia’s desk. It was, like everything of Julia’s, untidy, the blotting-paper over-inked, a pot of treasury-tags upturned, a heap of papers mixed with dirty handkerchiefs and envelopes, dried apple peel and tape. In the middle of it all was one of Julia’s cheap blue Century notebooks. Sicken 2, she had put on its cover: it held her plans for the novel she was working on now, a novel set in a nursing-home and called Sicken and So Die. Helen had come up with that title. She knew all the ins and outs of the complicated plot. She opened the book and looked inside it, and the apparently cryptic jottings—Inspector B to Maidstone—check RT, and Nurse Pringle—syrup, not needle!!—made perfect sense to her. There was nothing here that she didn’t understand. It was all as ordinary and as familiar to her as her own lopsided face.
Why, then, did Julia seem to recede from her, the closer she drew to objects like this? And where the hell was Julia now? She opened the notebook again and began to look more desperately through its pages, as if searching for clues. She picked up an inky handkerchief and shook it out. She looked beneath the blotting-pad. She opened drawers. She lifted a paper, an envelope, a book—
Underneath the book was the Radio Times from a fortnight before, folded open at the article about Julia.
URSULA WARING introduces Julia Standing’s thrilling new novel—
And there, of course, was the little photograph. Julia had gone to a Mayfair man to have it done, and Helen had gone with her, ‘for the fun of it’. The afternoon had been no fun at all. Helen had felt like a dowdy schoolgirl accompanying a good-looking friend to the hairdresser’s—holding Julia’s bag while the man made her pose and move about; having to watch while he smartened her hair, tilted her jaw, took her hands in his, the better to place them. The finished pictures were flattering, though Julia pretended not to like them; they made her look glamorous—but not glamorous, Helen thought, in the way she really, effortlessly was—as she lounged about the flat, say, in her unironed trousers and patched shirts. They made her look marriageable; Helen didn’t know if there was any better term. And she had thought, in great dismay, of all the ordinary people who must have picked up the Radio Times and opened it at Julia’s face and said to themselves, idly and admiringly, What a handsome woman! She’d pictured them as so many grubby fingers, rubbing down the image on a coin; or as quarrelling birds, pecking at Julia, taking her away, crumb by crumb…
She had been secretly glad when that issue had gone out of date and been replaced by another. Now, however, she looked at the magazine—at Julia’s picture, at Ursula Waring’s name—and all the old anxiety rose up in her as if fresh. She got into a squat, and closed her eyes, and bowed her head until her brow met the edge of Julia’s desk; she moved her face so that the edge ground into her and hurt her. I’d suffer more pain than this, she thought as she did it, to be sure of Julia! She thought of the things she’d readily give up—the tip of a finger, a toe, a day from the end of her life. She thought there ought to be a system—a sort of medieval system—whereby people could earn the things they passionately wanted by being flogged or branded or cut. She almost wished that Julia had failed. She thought the words: I wish she’d failed! What a little shit she must be! How the hell had she got to this place? This place where she wished things like that on Julia? But it’s only, she said wretchedly to herself, because I love her—
As she said the words, she heard the rattling of Julia’s key in the lock of their front door. She scrambled to her feet, switched off the light, and dashed downstairs; she went into the kitchen and pretended to be doing something at the sink, turning on the tap, filling a glass with water and emptying it out again. She didn’t look round. She was thinking, Don’t make a fuss. Everything’s all right. Be perfectly natural. Be quite calm.
Then Julia came to her, and kissed her; and she smelt wine and cigarette smoke on Julia’s mouth, and saw the bright, flushed, pleased expression on her face. And then her heart—for all that she was trying so desperately to hold back its jaws—her heart shut tight inside her, like a trap.
Julia said, ‘Darling! I’m so sorry.’
Helen spoke coldly. ‘What are you sorry for?’
‘It’s so late! I meant to be back hours ago. I had no idea.’
‘Where have you been?’
Julia turned away. She said lightly, ‘I’ve been with Ursula, that’s all. She invited me over for afternoon tea. Somehow, you know how it is, the tea turned into supper—’
‘Afternoon tea?’
‘Yes,’ said Julia. She was heading back into the hall, taking off her coat and hat.
‘That’s not like you, to cut into your working day like that.’
‘Well, I’d got heaps done earlier on. I worked like a demon, from nine until four! When Ursula rang, I thought—’
‘I called you at ten to two. Were you working then?’
Julia didn’t answer for a moment. She said at last, from out in the hall, ‘Ten to two? How very precise. I suppose I must have been.’
‘You don’t remember the phone ringing?’
‘Probably I was downstairs.’
Helen went out to her. ‘You heard Ursula Waring’s ring, though.’
Julia was tidying her hair at the hall mirror. She said, as if patiently, ‘Helen, don’t do this.’ She turned and looked, frowning, into Helen’s face. ‘What’s the matter with your forehead? It’s all red. Look, here.’
She came to Helen, her hand outstretched. Helen hit the hand away. ‘I had no idea where the hell you were! Couldn’t you have left me a note, even?’
‘I didn’t think to leave a note. One doesn’t suppose, when one goes out to lunch—’
Helen pounced. ‘To lunch? Not afternoon tea, then, after all?’
Julia’s flushed cheeks grew pinker. She put down her head and moved past Helen into the bedroom. ‘I just said lunch as an example. For God’s sake!’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Helen, following her in. ‘I think you’ve been out with Ursula Waring all day.’ No reply. ‘Well, have you?’
Julia had gone to the dressing-table and was getting herself a cigarette. Catching Helen’s bullying tone, she paused with the cigarette at her lips, and narrowed her eyes, and shook her head, as if in distaste and disbelief. She said, ‘Did this sort of thing seem flattering, once? Did it, ever?’ She turned, struck a match, and coolly lit the cigarette. When she turned back, her face had changed, become set, as if carved from coloured marble or a length of blemishless wood. She took the cigarette from her mouth and said, in a level, warning tone: ‘Don’t, Helen.’
‘Don’t what?’ asked Helen, as if amazed. But a part of her, too, was cringing from the words, utterly shamed by the monster she was making of herself. ‘Don’t what, Julia?’
‘Don’t start on all this—Christ! I’m not hanging around in here to listen to this.’ She pushed her way past Helen and went back into the kitchen.
Helen went after her. ‘You’re not hanging around, you mean, to let me catch you out in a lie. There’s a supper for you, but I don’t suppose you’ll need it. I suppose Ursula Waring took you to some chic restaurant. Full of BBC types, I expect. How jolly for you. I had to have dinner all on my own. I stood right here, at the bloody oven, and ate it with my apron on.’
The look of distaste reappeared on Julia’s face; but she laughed, too. She said, ‘Well, why for God’s sake did you do that?’
Helen didn’t know. It seemed absurd to her, now. If only she could laugh along with Julia. If only she could say, Oh Julia, what a fool I’m being! She felt like a person fallen overboard from a ship. She looked at Julia smoking her cigarette, putting the kettle on to boil: it was like seeing people doing ordinary things, strolling, sipping drinks, on the ship’s deck. There was still time, she thought, to put up her hand, to call out, Help! There was still time, and the ship would turn for her and she would be saved…
But she didn’t call, and in another moment there was no time at all; the ship had accelerated away and she was alone and helpless in a flat grey disc of sea. She started to thrash. She started to bluster. She spoke in a mad sort of hiss. It was all right for Julia, she said. Julia did just as she pleased. If Julia supposed Helen didn’t know what she got up to, behind Helen’s back, while Helen was at work—If Julia thought she could make a fool of her—Helen had known, from the moment she’d got home, that Julia was out with Ursula Waring! Did Julia imagine—? And so on. She’d pushed away that grubby, grinning jack-in-the-box, earlier on. Now it had sprung up again and its voice had become her own.
Julia, meanwhile, moved stonily around the kitchen, making tea. ‘No, Helen,’ she said, wearily, from time to time, ‘that’s not how it was,’ and, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Helen.’
‘When was it arranged, anyway?’ Helen asked now.
‘God! What?’
‘This tryst of yours, with Ursula Waring.’
‘Tryst! She called me up, some time this morning. Does it matter?’
‘Apparently it does matter, if you have to go creeping and sneaking about. If you have to lie to me—’
‘Well, what do you expect?’ cried Julia, losing her temper at last, putting down her cup so that the tea spilled. ‘It’s because I know you’ll behave like this! You twist everything so. You expect me to be guilty. It makes me appear to be guilty, even—Christ! Even to myself!’ She lowered her voice, mindful, even in her anger, of the couple downstairs. She went on, ‘If every time I meet some woman, make a friend—God! I got a call, the other day, from Daphne Rees. She asked me to have lunch with her—just an ordinary lunch!—and I said no, I was too busy; because I knew what you’d imagine. Phyllis Langdale wrote to me a month ago. No, you didn’t know that, did you? She said how nice it had been to meet us both, at Caroline’s supper-party. I thought of writing back and telling her what hell you’d given me over it in the taxi home! What a letter that would have made! “Dear Phyllis, I’d love to have drinks with you some time, but you see the thing is my girlfriend’s what they call a jealous type. If you were married, or extremely ugly, or some sort of cripple, I dare say things would be different. But a single, even vaguely attractive woman—my dear, I couldn’t risk it! Never mind if the girl’s not queer; apparently I’m so irrestistible that if she’s not a raving Lesbian when she sits down with me for a gin and French, she will be when she stands up again!”’
‘Shut up,’ said Helen. ‘You’re making me out to be a fool! I’m not a fool. I know what you’re like, how you are. I’ve seen you, with women—’
‘You think I’m interested in other women?’ Julia laughed. ‘Christ, if only!’
Helen looked at her. ‘What does that mean?’
Julia turned her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing, Helen. It always amazes me, that’s all, that it should be you who has this fucking—this fucking fixation. Is there something about affairs? Is it like—I don’t know—Catholicism? One only spots the other Romans when one’s practised it oneself?’
She met Helen’s gaze, and looked away again. They stood in silence for a moment. Then, ‘Work it up your arse,’ said Helen. She turned, and went back downstairs to the sitting-room.
She spoke quietly, and walked calmly; but the violence of her feelings appalled her. She couldn’t sit, she couldn’t be still. She drank the rest of her gin and water, and poured herself another glassful. She lit herself a cigarette—but put it out almost at once. She stood at the mantelpiece, trembling; she was afraid that, at any second, she might go shrieking and whirling about the house, pulling books from their shelves, ripping up cushions. She thought she could easily take hold of the hair on her own head and start tearing it out. If someone had handed her a knife, she would have jabbed it into herself.
After a minute she heard Julia going up to her study and closing its door. Then there was silence. What was she doing? What could she be doing, that she needed to close the door on it like that? She might be using the telephone…The more Helen thought about it, the more certain she began to feel that that was what Julia was doing. She was calling up Ursula Waring—calling her up to complain, to laugh, to make some fresh arrangement to meet…It was terrible, thought Helen, not to know! She couldn’t bear it. She went with diabolical stealth to the bottom of the stairs, and held her breath, trying to hear.
Then she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror: saw her flushed, contorted face; and felt filled with disgust. The disgust was worse than anything. She put up a hand to cover her eyes, and went back into the sitting-room. She didn’t think of going up to Julia. It seemed natural to her, now, that Julia should loathe her, should want to turn away from her; she loathed herself, she wished she could turn away from her own skin. She felt utterly trapped, suffocated. She stood for a moment not knowing what to do with herself, then went to the window and put back the curtain. She looked at the the street, the garden, the houses with their peeling stucco façades. She saw a world of devious things out to trick and mock her. A man and a woman walked by, hand in hand, smiling: it seemed to her that they must have a secret, to safety and ease and trust, that she had lost.
She sat, and switched off the lamp. Down in the basement the man, the woman, and their daughter called out, from room to room; the girl started playing a recorder, going over and over the same halting nursery tune. There was no sound from the rooms upstairs until, at ten o’clock or so, Julia’s door was opened and she went quietly down to the kitchen. Helen followed her movements with horrible distinctness: heard her pass back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom; saw her come down to use the lavatory, go to the bathroom, wash her face; saw her go up again to the bedroom, switching off the lights behind her as she went; heard her moving across the creaking bedroom floor as she took off her clothes and got into bed. She didn’t attempt to speak to Helen, or come to the sitting-room at all, and Helen didn’t call out. The bedroom door was pushed to, but not closed: the light from the reading-lamp showed in the stairwell for a quarter of an hour, and then was extinguished.
The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She only had to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place, but she couldn’t do it; she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn’t feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn’t feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes. Perhaps Julia will come down and see me lying on the floor, she thought, as she lay there; she thought that if Julia did that, then she would at least realise the extremity of the feeling by which she, Helen, was gripped.
Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she’d lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She had often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. I won’t be doing it, she said to herself, like some hysterical girl. I won’t be doing it for Julia, hoping she’ll come and catch me at it. It won’t be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I’ll be doing it for myself, as a secret.
She didn’t allow herself to think what a very poor secret such a thing would be. She went quietly up to the kitchen and got her sponge-bag from the cupboard; came back down to the bathroom, softly closed and locked the door, and turned on the light; and at once felt better. The light was bright, like the lights you saw in hospital operating-rooms in films; the bare white surfaces of the bath and basin contributed, too, a certain clinical feeling, a sense of efficiency, even of duty. She was not in the least like some hysterical girl. She saw her face in the mirror again and the scarlet had faded from her cheek; she looked perfectly reasonable and calm.
She proceeded, now, as if she’d planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case that held the safety-razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal, and eased out the blade. How thin it was, how flexible! It was like holding nothing—a wafer, a counter in a game, a postage stamp. Her only concern was where she might cut. She looked at her arms; she thought perhaps the inside of the arm, where the flesh was softer and might be supposed to yield more easily. She considered her stomach, for a similar reason. She didn’t think of her wrists, ankles, or shins, or any hard part like that. Finally she settled on her inner thigh. She put up a foot to the cold rounded lip of the bath; found the pose too cramped; lengthened her stride and braced her foot against the farther wall. She drew back her skirt, wondered about tucking it into her knickers, thought of taking it off entirely. For, suppose she should bleed on it? She had no idea how much blood to expect.
Her thigh was pale, creamy-pale against the white of the bath-tub, and seemed huge beneath her hands. She’d never contemplated it in just this way before, and she was struck now by how perfectly featureless it was. If she were to see it in isolation, she’d hardly know it as a functioning piece of limb. She didn’t think she would even recognise it as hers.
She put a hand upon the leg, to stretch the flesh tight between her fingers and her thumb; she listened once, to be sure that there was no one out in the hall able to hear her; then she brought the edge of the blade to the skin and made a cut. The cut was shallow, but impossibly painful: she felt it, like stepping in icy water, as a hideous shock to the heart. She recoiled for a moment, then tried a second time. The sensation was the same. She literally gasped. Do it again, more swiftly! she said to herself; but the thinness and flexibility of the metal, which had seemed almost attractive before, now struck her, in relation to the springing fatness of her thigh, as repulsive. The slicing was too precise. The cuts she’d made were filling with blood; the blood rose slowly, however—as if grudgingly—and seemed to darken and congeal at once. The edges of flesh were already closing: she put the razor blade down and pulled them apart. That made the blood come a little faster. At last it spilled from the skin and grew smeary. She watched, for a minute; two or three times more worked the flesh around the cuts, to make the blood flow again; then she rubbed the leg clean, as best she could, with a dampened handkerchief.
She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.
She sat down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some almost chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed, alive, and chastened. She’d lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do; she would have hated, for example, for Julia, or any of their friends, to have come upon her as she was doing it. She would have died of embarrassment! And yet—She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way. You perfect fool, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.
Julia lay on her side, turned away from the door, her face in darkness, her hair very black against her pillow. It was impossible to say whether she was sleeping or awake.
‘Julia,’ said Helen, quietly.
‘What?’ asked Julia after a moment.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Do you hate me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t hate me as much as I hate myself.’
Julia rolled on to her back. ‘Do you say that as some sort of consolation?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Helen. She went closer, put her fingers to Julia’s hair.
Julia flinched. ‘Your hand’s freezing. Don’t touch me!’ She took Helen’s hand. ‘For God’s sake, why are you so cold? Where have you been?’
‘In the bathroom. Nowhere.’
‘Get into bed, can’t you?’
Helen moved away to take off her clothes, unpin her hair, draw on her nightdress. She did it all in a creeping, craven sort of way. Julia said again, when she’d got into the bed beside her, ‘You’re so cold!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen. She hadn’t noticed the chill, before; but now, feeling the warmth of Julia’s body, she began to shake. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. Her teeth chattered in her head. She tried to make herself rigid; the trembling grew worse.
‘God!’ said Julia; but she put her arm around Helen and drew her close. She was wearing a boy’s striped nightshirt: it smelt of sleep, of unmade beds, of unwashed hair—but pleasantly, deliciously. Helen lay against her and shut her eyes. She felt exhausted, emptied out. She thought of the evening that had passed, and it was astonishing to her that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.
Perhaps Julia thought the same. She lifted a hand and rubbed her face. ‘What a ridiculous night!’ she said.
‘Do you really hate me, Julia?’
‘Yes. No, I don’t suppose so.’
‘I can’t help myself,’ said Helen. ‘I don’t know myself, when I’m like that. It’s like—’
But she couldn’t explain it; she never could. It sounded childish, every time. She could never convey to Julia how utterly dreadful it was to have that seething, wizened little gnome-like thing spring up and consume you; how exhausting, to have to tuck it back into your breast when it was done; how frightening, to feel it there, living inside you, waiting its chance to spring again…
She said only, ‘I love you, Julia.’
And Julia answered: ‘Idiot. Go to sleep.’
They were silent after that. Julia lay tensely for a time, but soon her limbs began to slacken and her breaths to deepen and slow. Once, as if startled by a dream, she jumped, and that made Helen jump, too; but then she settled back into slumber. Out in the street, there were voices. Someone ran laughing along the pavement. In the house next door a plug was drawn from an electric socket, a window went squealing against its frame and was closed with a bang.
Julia stirred in her sleep, made uneasy by dreams again. Who, wondered Helen, was she dreaming of? Not Ursula Waring, after all. But not of me, either, Helen thought. For, wakeful, chastened, she saw it all very plainly now: Julia’s staying out so late, when she might so easily have left a note; when she might so easily have done it differently, done it in secret, not done it at all…Don’t, Helen, Julia said, in exasperation, every time. But if she didn’t want bluster and fuss, why did she make it so easy for Helen to create them? With some part of herself, Helen thought, she must long for them. She must long for them because she knew that, beyond them, there was nothing: deadness, blankness, the arid surface of her own parched heart.
When did Julia stop loving me? Helen wondered now. It was too frightful a thought to pursue, however; and she was too exhausted. She lay open-eyed, still pressed close to Julia, still feeling the heat of her limbs, the rising and falling of her breath. But in time she changed her pose, and moved away.
And as her hand slid across the cotton of Julia’s nightshirt, she thought of something else—a silly thing—she thought of a pair of pyjamas she’d once owned, when the war was on, and then had lost. They were satin pyjamas, the colour of pearls: the most beautiful pyjamas, it seemed to her now, as she lay alone and untouched in the darkness at Julia’s side; the most beautiful pyjamas she’d ever seen.
Duncan had come home from work that night and heated a kettle full of water; he’d taken the kettle up to his room, stripped down to his vest, and washed his hands, his face, and his hair—trying to get the feel of the factory out of them, wanting to look his best for his evening with Fraser.
Still in his vest and trousers he’d gone downstairs, to polish his shoes, to put a towel on the kitchen counter and iron a shirt. The shirt had a soft collar to it, like the shirts that Fraser wore; and when Duncan put it on, still hot from the iron, he left it unbuttoned at the throat—just as Fraser wore his. He thought, too, of leaving the Brylcreem off his hair. He went back up to his bedroom and stood at his mirror, combing the hair this way and that, trying out different partings, different ways of letting it tumble over his brow…But the hair, as it dried, began to grow downy; he began to remind himself of the little boy in the ‘Bubbles’ advert for Pears soap. So he put the Brylcreem on after all, worrying that he’d left it too late, spending five or ten more minutes with the comb, trying to get the waves to sit right.
When he’d finished he went downstairs again and Mr Mundy said, with a dreadful forced sort of brightness, ‘My word! The girls are in for a treat tonight, all right! What time’s he coming for you, son?’
‘Half-past seven,’ said Duncan shyly, ‘the same as last time. But we’re going to a different pub, on a different bit of the river. They sell a better sort of beer, Fraser says.’
Mr Mundy nodded, his face still stretched in a ghastly smile. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the girls won’t know what’s hit them tonight!’
He had not been able to believe it when Duncan had brought Fraser home, that other time, two weeks before. Fraser had not been able to believe it, either. The three of them had sat in the parlour together, at a loss for things to say; in the end the little cat had come trotting innocently in, and that had saved them. They’d spent twenty minutes making her chase after bits of string. Duncan had even got down on the floor and shown Fraser his trick of letting her walk up his body. Mr Mundy had gone around since then like a wounded man. His limp had worsened; he’d begun to stoop. Mr Leonard, in his crooked house in the street off Lavender Hill, had been very dismayed at the change in him. He spoke more passionately to him than ever about the necessity of resisting the lure of Error and False Belief.
Tonight, once Fraser arrived, Duncan planned to get out as quickly as he could. He and Mr Mundy ate their tea, then stood together washing up the dishes; and as soon as the dishes were stacked away, he put on his jacket. He sat in the parlour, at the very front of his chair, ready to spring up the moment he heard Fraser’s knock.
But he picked up a book, too, to pass the time, and to make himself look careless. The book was a library book on antique silver, with a table of hallmarks: he worked his finger down the page, trying to memorise the significance of anchors, crowns, lions, thistles—all the time, of course, listening out for that tap at the door…Half-past seven came and went. He began to grow tense. He started to imagine all the ordinary things that might be keeping Fraser away. He pictured Fraser coming breathlessly to the door, just as he had come breathlessly up to the factory gate, that other time. His face would be pink, his hair would be bouncing over his brow, and he’d say, ‘Pearce! Had you given up on me? I’m so sorry! I’ve been—’ The excuses grew wilder as the minutes ticked by. He’d been stuck in an Underground train, going out of his mind with frustration. He’d seen a person get hit by a car, and had to send for an ambulance!
By quarter-past eight Duncan had begun to worry that Fraser might have come, have knocked, and gone away unheard. Mr Mundy had switched the wireless on, and the programme was rather noisy. So, on the pretext of getting himself a glass of water, he went out into the hall and stood quite still, cocking his head, listening for footsteps; he even, very softly, opened the front door and looked up and down the street. But there was no sign of Fraser. He went back into the parlour, leaving the door propped open. The radio programme changed, then changed again a half-hour later. The grandfather clock kept sending out its heavy, hollow chimes.
It took him until half-past nine to understand that Fraser wasn’t going to come. The disappointment was dreadful—but then, he was used to disappointment; the first sting of it faded, turned instead into a settled blankness of heart. He put down his book, the table of hallmarks unlearnt. He was aware of Mr Mundy’s gaze, but couldn’t bring himself to meet it. And when Mr Mundy got up, came awkwardly to him, and lightly patted his shoulder and said, ‘There. He’s a busy chap, I expect. He’ll have run into a couple of pals. That’s what’s happened, you mark my words!’—when Mr Mundy said that, he couldn’t answer. He found he almost hated the feel of Mr Mundy’s hand. Mr Mundy waited, then moved off. He went out to the kitchen. He let the parlour door close behind him, and Duncan suddenly felt the closeness and the airlessness of the dim, small, crowded room. He had a horrible sense of himself falling, falling, as if down the narrow shaft of a well.
But the panic, like the disappointment, flared in him and died. Mr Mundy returned in time with a cup of cocoa: Duncan took it from his hands and meekly drank it. He carried the cup out to the kitchen and washed it himself, turning it over and over in the stream of cold water. The milk that was left in the pan he put down in a saucer on the floor, for the cat. He went out to the lavatory and, for a little while, just stood there in the yard, looking up at the sky.
When he went back into the parlour Mr Mundy was already going about shaking cushions, getting ready for bed. As Duncan watched, he started turning off the lamps. He moved from one lamp to the next. The parlour grew dark, the faces in the pictures on the walls, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, drawing back into shadow. It was just ten o’clock.
They went upstairs together, slowly, taking one step at a time. Mr Mundy kept his hand in the crook of Duncan’s elbow; and at the top he had to pause, still with his hand on Duncan’s arm, to get his breath back.
When he spoke, his voice was husky. He said, without looking at Duncan, ‘You’ll come in, son, in a minute, to say goodnight?’
Duncan didn’t answer straight away. They stood in silence, and he felt Mr Mundy stiffen as if afraid…Then, ‘Yes,’ he said, very quietly. ‘All right.’
Mr Mundy nodded, his shoulders drooping with relief. ‘Thank you, son,’ he said. He drew off his hand and made his slow, shuffling way along the landing to his bedroom. Duncan went into his own room and started to undress.
This room was small: a boy’s room—the very room, in fact, in which Mr Mundy himself had used to sleep, when he was young and lived in this house with his parents and sister. The bed was a high Victorian one, with polished brass balls at each of its corners; Duncan had once unscrewed one of these and found a slip of paper inside it, marked in a smudged childish hand: Mabel Alice Mundy twenty dredful curses on you if you read this! The books in the bookcase were boys’ adventure stories with broad, colourful spines. On the mantelpiece, set out as if to fight, were some badly painted old lead soldiers. But Mr Mundy had put up shelves, too, for Duncan to display his own things, the things he’d bought in markets and antique shops. Duncan usually spent a moment, before he went to bed, looking over the pots and jars and ornaments, the teaspoons and tear-bottles, picking them up and delighting in them all over again; thinking about where they’d come from and who’d owned them before.
But he looked at it all, tonight, without much interest. He briefly picked up the bit of clay pipe he’d found on the beach by the riverside pub, that was all. He put his pyjamas on slowly, buttoning the jacket, then tucking it tidily into the trousers. He cleaned his teeth, and combed his hair again—combed it differently this time, making it neat, putting a parting in it like a child’s. He was very aware, as he did all this, of Mr Mundy waiting patiently in the room next door; he pictured him lying very still and straight, his head propped up on feather pillows, the blankets drawn up to his armpits, his hands neatly folded, but ready to pat the side of the bed, invitingly, when Duncan went in…It wasn’t much. It was almost nothing. Duncan thought of other things. There was a picture, hanging over Mr Mundy’s bed: a scene of an angel, safely leading children over a narrow, precipitous bridge. He’d look at that until it was over. He’d look at the complicated folds in the angel’s gown; at the children’s large, innocent-spiteful Victorian faces.
He put down his comb and picked up the bit of clay pipe again; and this time touched it to his mouth. It was chill and very smooth. He closed his eyes and moved it lightly across his lips, backwards and forwards—liking the feel of it, but made miserable by it, too; aware of the uneasy stir of sensations it was calling up inside him. If only Fraser, he thought, had come! Perhaps, after all, he’d simply forgotten. It might be something as ordinary as that. If you were another sort of boy, he said bitterly to himself, you wouldn’t have sat around here just waiting for him to turn up, you’d have gone out to find him. If you were a proper sort of boy you’d go out to his house right now—
He opened his eyes—and at once met his own gaze in the mirror. His hair was combed in its neat white parting, his pyjama jacket buttoned up to the chin; but he wasn’t a boy. He wasn’t ten years old. He wasn’t even seventeen. He was twenty-four, and could do what he liked. He was twenty-four, and Mr Mundy—
Mr Mundy, he thought suddenly, could go to hell. Why shouldn’t Duncan go out and get Fraser, if that’s what he wanted? He knew the way to Fraser’s street. He knew the very house Fraser lived in, because Fraser had taken him past the end of his road, once, and pointed it out to him!
He moved about very quickly now. He messed up the parting in his hair. He put on his trousers and his jacket, pulling them on right over his pyjamas, not wanting to waste even a minute by taking the pyjamas off. He put on his socks and his polished shoes, and as he stooped to tie his laces he realised that his hands were shaking; but he wasn’t afraid. He felt almost giddy.
His shoes must have sounded loudly against the floor as he walked about. He heard the uneasy creaking of Mr Mundy’s bed, and that made him move faster. He stepped out of his room and glanced just once across the landing to Mr Mundy’s door; then he went quickly down the stairs.
The house was dark, but he knew his way through it as a blind man would, putting out his hand and finding doorknobs, anticipating steps and slippery rugs. He didn’t go to the front door, because he knew that Mr Mundy’s bedroom overlooked the street, and he wanted to go more secretly. For even in the midst of his excitement—even after having said to himself that Mr Mundy, for all he cared, could go to hell!—even after that, he thought it would be horrible to look back and see Mr Mundy at the window, watching him go.
So he went the back way, through to the kitchen and out, past the lavatory, to the end of the yard; and only when he got to the yard door did he remember that it was kept shut with a padlock. He knew where the key was, and might have run back for it; but he couldn’t bear to go back now, not even as far as the scullery drawer. He dragged over a couple of crates and clambered up them, like a thief, to the top of the wall; he dropped to the other side, landing heavily, hurting his foot, hopping about.
But the feeling, suddenly, of having a locked door behind him was wonderful. He said to himself, in Alec’s voice: There’s no going back now, D.P.!
He made his way along the alley at the back of Mr Mundy’s house, and emerged in a residential street. The street was one he walked down often, but it seemed transformed to him now, in the darkness. He moved more slowly, taken with the strange aspect of it all: very aware of the people in the houses that he passed; seeing lights put out in downstairs rooms and springing on in bedrooms and on landings, as the people went to bed. He saw a woman lift a white net curtain to reach for a window latch: the curtain draped her as a veil would a bride. In a modern house, a frosted bathroom window was lit up and showed, very clearly, a man in a vest: he sipped from a glass, put back his head to gargle, then jerked forward to spit the gargle out. Duncan caught the ring of the glass as it was set down on the basin, and when the man turned on a tap, he heard the water rushing through a waste-pipe, spluttering as it struck the drain below. The world seemed full, to him, of extraordinary new things. Nobody challenged him. Nobody seemed even to look at him. He moved through the streets as a ghost might.
He walked, in this unreal, fascinated way, through Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, for almost an hour; then slowed his step and grew more wary, finding the end of Fraser’s street. The houses here were rather grander than the ones he was used to; they were that kind of red-brick Edwardian villa you saw turned into doctors’ surgeries, or homes for the blind, or—as in this street—boarding-houses. Each had its own name, set above its door in leaded letters. Fraser’s house, Duncan saw as he drew close to it, was called St Day’s. A sign said No Vacancies.
Duncan stood, hesitating, at the gate to the shallow front garden. He knew that Fraser’s room was the one on the ground floor, on the left-hand side. He remembered that, because Fraser had made a joke of the fact that his landlady called this room front bottom; he said it was like something one’s nurse would say. The curtains at the window were drawn together. They were old black-out curtains, and perfectly dark. But there was a slim, brilliant blade of colour where Fraser hadn’t pulled them quite shut. Duncan thought he could hear a voice, too, talking monotonously, in the room beyond.
The sound of the voice made him suddenly uncertain. Suppose Mr Mundy was right, and Fraser had spent the evening with his friends? What would he think of Duncan turning up in the middle of it all? What sort of people would the friends be? Duncan imagined university types, clever young men with pipes and spectacles and knitted ties. Then he had an even worse thought. He thought that Fraser might be in there with a girl. He saw the girl very clearly: stout, blowsy, with a tittering laugh; with wet red lips and cherry-brandy breath.
Until he’d had this dreadful vision he’d been going to walk to the front door, like a proper visitor, and ring the bell. Now, as he grew nervous, the temptation to tiptoe over to the window and just quickly peer inside was too much for him. So he unlatched the gate and pushed it open; it swung noiselessly on its hinge. He went up the path, then made his way between rustling bushes to the window. With his heart thudding, he put his face to the glass.
He saw Fraser at once. He was sitting in an armchair at the back of the room, beyond the bed. He was dressed in his shirt-sleeves, and had his head put back; beside his chair was a table with a mess of papers on it, and his pipe in an ashtray, and a glass, and a bottle of what looked like whisky. He was sitting quite still, as if dozing, though the voice that Duncan had heard before was still going monotonously on…But now the voice gave way to a low burst of music, and Duncan realised that it was coming from a radio, that was all. The music, in fact, seemed to wake Fraser up. He got to his feet and rubbed his face. He went across the room, moved just out of Duncan’s vision, and the sound was abruptly cut off. As he walked, Duncan saw that he’d taken his shoes off. His socks had holes in them: great big holes, showing his toes and uncut toenails.
The sight of the holes and the toenails gave Duncan courage. When Fraser moved back towards his chair as if meaning to sink down in it again, he tapped on the glass.
At once, Fraser stopped and turned his head, frowning, searching for the source of the sound. He looked at the gap in the curtains—looked right, as it seemed to Duncan, into Duncan’s eyes; but couldn’t see him. The sensation was unnerving. Again Duncan felt, but less pleasantly this time, like a ghost. He lifted his hand and tapped harder—and that made Fraser cross the room and take hold of the curtain and pull it back.
When he caught sight of Duncan, he looked amazed. ‘Pearce!’ he said. But then he winced, and glanced quickly at the bedroom door. He thumbed back the catch of the window and quietly raised the sash, putting a finger to his lips.
‘Not too loudly. I think the landlady’s in the hall. What the hell are you doing here? Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Duncan quietly. ‘I just came looking for you. I’ve been waiting at Mr Mundy’s. Why didn’t you come? I waited for you all night.’
Fraser looked guilty. ‘I’m sorry. The time ran away with me. Then it was late, and—’ He made a hopeless gesture. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I was waiting for you,’ Duncan said again. ‘I thought something must have happened to you.’
‘I’m sorry. Truly I am. I didn’t suppose you’d come and find me! How did you get here?’
‘I just walked.’
‘Mr Mundy let you?’
Duncan snorted. ‘Mr Mundy couldn’t stop me! I’ve been walking in the streets.’
Fraser looked him over, peering at his jacket, frowning again but beginning to smile. He said, ‘You’ve got—you’ve got your pyjamas on!’
‘So?’ said Duncan, touching his collar self-consciously. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’ll save me time.’
‘What?’
‘It’ll save me time, later, when I go to bed.’
‘You’re crazy, Pearce!’
‘You’re the crazy one. You smell of drink. You smell awful! What have you been doing?’
But bafflingly, Fraser had started to laugh. ‘I’ve been out with a girl,’ he said.
‘I knew you had! What girl? What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing,’ said Fraser. But he was still laughing. ‘It’s just—this girl.’
‘Well, what about her?’
‘Oh, Pearce.’ Fraser wiped his lips and tried to speak more soberly. ‘It was your sister,’ he said.
Duncan stared at him, growing cold. ‘My sister! What are you talking about? You can’t mean Viv?’
‘Yes, I mean Viv. We went to a pub. She was awfully nice—laughed at all of my jokes; even let me kiss her, in the end. Had the grace to blush, too, when I opened my eyes and found her sneaking a glance at her wrist-watch…I put her on the bus and sent her home.’
‘But, how?’ asked Duncan.
‘We just walked to a bus-stop—’
‘You know what I mean! How did you meet her? Why did you do it? Take her out, I mean, and—?’
Fraser was laughing again. But his laughter had changed. It was rueful now, almost embarrassed. He lifted a hand, to cover his mouth.
And, after a moment, Duncan began to laugh, too. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t know what he was laughing at, even—whether it was Fraser, or himself, or Viv, or Mr Mundy, or all of them. But for almost a minute he and Fraser stood there, on either side of the window-sill, their hands across their mouths, their eyes filling with tears, their faces flushing, as they tried, hopelessly, to stifle their laughter and snorts.
Then Fraser grew a little calmer. He glanced over his shoulder again and whispered, ‘All right. I think she’s gone up now. Come in, though, for God’s sake! Before a policeman or somebody spots us.’
And then he moved back, and put aside the black-out curtain, so that Duncan could climb in.
Ah, Miss Langrish,’ said Mr Leonard, drawing open his door.
Kay gave a jump. She had been going softly up the darkened staircase, but a creaking board must have given her away. Mr Leonard, she guessed, had been sitting up alone in his treatment-room, making his night watch, sending out prayers. He was dressed in his shirt-sleeves, the cuffs rolled back. He had put on the indigo-coloured lamp he used when healing at night, and the blue of it lit the landing strangely.
He stood in his doorway, his face in shadow. He said quietly, ‘I’ve been thinking of you tonight, Miss Langrish. How are you?’
She told him she was well. He said, ‘You’ve been out, I imagine, enjoying the evening?’ He tilted his head and added, ‘You’ve seen old friends?’
‘I’ve been to a cinema,’ she answered quickly.
He nodded, as if sagely. ‘A cinema, yes. Such curious places, I always think. Such instructive places…Next time you go to a cinema, Miss Langrish, you ought to just try something. Just turn your head and look over your shoulder. What will you find? So many faces, all lit by the restless, flickering light of impermanent things. Eyes fixed, and wide, with awe, with terror or with lust. Just so, you see, is the unevolved spirit held in thrall by material sense; by fictions and by dreams…’
His voice was low, level, compelling. When she said nothing, he came closer to her and gently caught hold of her hand. He said, ‘I think you are one of those spirits, Miss Langrish. I think you are searching, but held in thrall. That is because you are searching with your eyes cast down, seeing nothing but dust. You must lift up your gaze, my dear. You must learn to look away from perishable things.’
His palm and fingertips were soft, and his grip seemed gentle; even so, she had to make a little effort in order to draw her hand away. She said, ‘I will. I—Thank you, Mr Leonard,’ sounding ridiculous to herself, her voice thick, uncertain, not at all like her own. She moved from him: went gracelessly up the staircase to her room; fumbled with the lock of it before she got the door open and went inside.
She waited for the click of Mr Leonard’s door downstairs and then, without putting on the light, crossed to her armchair and sat down. Her foot struck something as she went, and sent it rustling over the rucked-up rug: she’d left a newspaper, open, on the floor. On the arm of her chair was a dirty plate and an old tin pie-dish, overflowing with ash and cigarette stubs. A shirt and some collars that she had recently washed were hanging from a string in the fireplace, pale and flimsy-looking in the gloom.
She kept still for a moment, then put her hand to her pocket and brought out that ring. It felt bulky to her touch, and the finger on which she’d used to wear it was too slim, now, to keep it in place. When she had taken it, in the street, it had still been warm from Viv’s hand. She had sat in the cinema, staring unseeingly at the roaring, twitching pantomime being played out on the screen, turning the gold band over and over, running her fingertips across all its little scratches and dents…At last, unable to bear it, she’d clumsily put the ring away and got to her feet; had stumbled along the cinema row, gone quickly through the foyer, and out into the street.
Since then she had been walking. She’d walked to Oxford Street, to Rathbone Place, to Bloomsbury—restless and searching, just as Mr Leonard had guessed. She’d thought of going back to Mickey’s boat, had got as far as Paddington, even, before she’d given the idea up. For, what was the point? She’d gone into a pub instead, and had a couple of whiskys. She’d bought a drink for a blond-haired girl; that had made her feel better.
After that she’d come wearily home to Lavender Hill. Now she felt exhausted. She turned the ring in her fingers as she’d turned it in the cinema, but even the slight weight of it seemed too heavy for her hand. She gazed about, listlessly, for somewhere to put it, and finally dropped it into the pie-dish, amongst the cigarette stubs.
But it lay there gleaming, undimmed by ash; it kept drawing her eye, and after a minute she fished it out again and rubbed it clean. She put it back on her slender finger; and closed her fist, to keep it from slipping.
The house was still. All London seemed still. Only, presently, did there rise, from the room below, the muffled throb of Mr Leonard’s murmur, which told her he was hard at work again; and she pictured him, bathed in indigo electric light: hunched and watchful, sending out his fierce benediction into the fragility of the night.