Miss Giniver,’ said Miss Chisholm, putting her head around Helen’s door, ‘there’s a lady to see you.’
It was a week or so later. Helen was fastening papers together with a clip, and didn’t look up. ‘Does she have an appointment?’
‘She asked in particular for you.’
‘Did she? Blast.’ This was what came of giving out your name too freely. ‘Where is she?’
‘She said she wouldn’t come in, as she’s rather shabby.’
‘Well, she can hardly be too shabby to come in here. Tell her we’re not fussy. She must make an appointment, though.’
Miss Chisholm came further into the room and held out a folded piece of paper. ‘She wanted me to give you this,’ she said, with a hint of disapproval. ‘I told her we weren’t in the habit of accepting personal post.’
Helen took the note. It was addressed to Miss Helen Giniver, in a hand she didn’t recognise, and there was a dirty thumb-print on it. She opened it up. It said:
Are you free for lunch? I have tea, and rabbit-meat sandwiches! What do you say? Don’t worry, if not. But I’ll be outside for the next ten minutes.
And it was signed Julia.
Helen saw the signature first, and her heart gave an astonishing sort of fillip in her breast, like a leaping fish. She was horribly aware of Miss Chisholm, watching. She closed the paper smartly back up.
‘Thank you, Miss Chisholm,’ she said, as she ran her thumbnail along the fold. ‘It’s just a friend of mine. I’ll—I’ll go out to her, when I’ve finished here.’
She slipped the note under a pile of other papers and picked up a pen, as if meaning to write. But as soon as she heard Miss Chisholm going back to her desk in the outer office, she put the pen down. She unlocked a drawer in her own desk and took out her handbag, to tidy her hair, put on powder and lipstick.
Then she squinted at herself in the mirror of her compact. A woman could always tell, she thought, when a girl had just done her face; she didn’t want Miss Chisholm to notice—worse, she didn’t want Julia to think she had put on make-up especially for her. So she got out her handkerchief and tried to wipe some of the powder away. She drew in her lips and bit repeatedly at the cloth, to blot off the lipstick. She slightly disarranged her hair. Now, she thought, I look like I’ve been in some sort of tussle—
For God’s sake! What did it matter? It was only Julia. She put the make-up away, got her coat and hat and scarf; went lightly past Miss Chisholm’s desk and out along the Town Hall corridors to the lobby and the street.
Julia was standing in front of one of the grey stone lions. She had on her dungarees and her denim jacket again, but this time, instead of a turban, her hair was tied up in a scarf. She had her hands looped around the strap of a leather satchel, slung over her shoulder, and she was gazing at nothing, rocking slightly from foot to foot. But when she heard the swinging back of the bomb-proofed doors she looked round and smiled. And at the sight of her smile, Helen’s heart gave another absurd lurch—a twitch, or wriggle, that was almost painful.
But she spoke calmly. ‘Hello, Julia. What a nice surprise.’
‘Is it?’ asked Julia. ‘I thought that, since I know where you work now…’ She looked up at the sky, which was clouded and grey. ‘I was hoping for a sunny day, like last time. It’s pretty chilly, isn’t it? I thought—But tell me, if this sounds like a lousy idea. I’ve been working so long among ruins, on my own, I’ve forgotten all the social niceties. But I thought you might like to come and look at the house I’ve pitched up in, in Bryanston Square—see what I’ve been up to. The place has been empty for months, I’m sure no one would mind.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Helen.
‘Really?’
‘Yes!’
‘All right,’ said Julia, smiling again. ‘I won’t take your arm, as I’m so filthy; but this way is nicest.’
She led Helen along the Marylebone Road, and soon made a turn into quieter streets. ‘Was that the famous Miss Chisholm,’ she said as they went, ‘who took my note? I see what you mean about those pursed lips. She looked at me as though she thought I had designs on the office safe!’
‘She looks at me like that,’ said Helen.
Julia laughed. ‘She ought to have seen this.’ She opened her satchel and brought out an enormous bunch of keys, each with a tattered label attached. She held it up and shook it like a gaoler. ‘What do you think? I got these from the local warden. I’ve been in and out of half the houses around here. Marylebone has no more secrets from me. You’d think people would have got used to the sight of me ferreting around—but, no. A couple of days ago someone saw me having trouble with a lock, and called the police. She said an “obviously foreign-looking” woman was trying to force her way into a house. I don’t know if she took me for a Nazi, or a vagrant refugee. The police were pretty decent about it. Do you think I look foreign?’
She had been sorting through the keys, but raised her head as she asked this. Helen looked into her face, then looked away.
‘It’s your dark colouring, I suppose.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I should be all right, anyway, now you’re with me. You’ve those English flower looks, haven’t you? No one could mistake you for anything but an Ally.—Here we are. The place we want is just over there.’
She took Helen to the door of a grim, tall, dilapidated house, and put one of her keys into its lock. A stream of dust fell from the lintel as she pushed the door open, and Helen went gingerly inside. She was met at once by a bitter, damp smell, like that of old wash-cloths.
‘That’s just from rain,’ said Julia, as she closed the door and fiddled with the latch. ‘The roof’s been hit, and most of the windows blasted out. Sorry it’s so dark. The electricity’s off, of course. Go through that doorway over there, it’s a little lighter.’
Helen moved across the hall and found herself at the entrance to a sitting-room, cast in a sort of flat twilight by a partly shuttered window. For a moment, until her eyes had grown used to the gloom, the room looked almost all right; then she began to see more clearly, and stepped forward, saying, ‘Oh! What an awful shame! This lovely furniture!’ For there was a carpet on the floor, and a handsome sofa and chairs, and a footstool, a table—all of it dusty, and heavily marked by flying glass and fallen plaster, or else damp, the wood with a bloom on it and beginning to swell. ‘And the chandelier!’ she cried softly, looking up.
‘Yes, watch your step,’ said Julia, coming to her and touching her arm. ‘Half the lustres have fallen and smashed.’
‘I thought, from what you’d said, that the place would be quite empty. Why on earth don’t the people who own it come back, and fix it up, or take these things away?’
‘They think there’s no point, I suppose,’ said Julia, ‘since it’s half-way wrecked already. The woman’s probably holed up with relatives in the country. The husband might be fighting; he might even be dead.’
‘But these lovely things!’ said Helen again. She thought of the men and women who came into her office. ‘Somebody else could live here, surely? I see so many people with absolutely nothing.’
Julia tapped with her knuckles against the wall. ‘The place isn’t sound. Another close hit, and it may collapse. It probably will. That’s why my father and I are in here. We’re recording ghosts, you see, really.’
Helen moved slowly across the room, looking in dismay from one spoiled handsome thing to another. She went to a set of high double doors and carefully pulled them ajar. The room beyond was just as wretched as this one—its window smashed, its velvet curtains marked with rain, spots on the floor where birds had dirtied, soot and cinders blasted from the hearth. She took a step, and something crunched beneath her shoe—a piece of burnt-out coke. It left a smudge of black on the carpet. She looked back at Julia and said, ‘I’m afraid to keep going. It doesn’t seem right.’
‘You get used to that; don’t worry. I’ve been tramping up and down the stairs for weeks and not given it a thought.’
‘You’re absolutely sure there’s no one here? No one like the old lady you told me about last week? And no one’s likely to come back?’
‘No one,’ said Julia. ‘My father may put his head in later, that’s all. I’ve left the door unlocked for him.’ She held out her hand, in a beckoning gesture. ‘Come downstairs, and you can see what he and I have been doing.’
She went back into the hall, and Helen followed her down a set of unlit stairs to a basement room, where she had laid out, on a trestle table in the light of a barred but broken window, various plans and elevations of the houses of the square. She showed Helen how she was marking the damage—the symbols she was using, the system of measurement, things like that.
‘It looks very technical,’ said Helen, impressed.
But Julia answered, ‘It’s probably no more technical than the kind of thing you’re used to doing at that office of yours—balancing books, filling in forms, and whatnot. I’m utterly useless at things like that. I should hate, too, to have to deal with people coming in and out, wanting things; I don’t know how you bear it. This suits me because it’s so solitary, so silent.’
‘You don’t find it lonely?’
‘Sometimes. I’m used to it, though. The author’s temperament, and all that…’ She stretched. ‘Shall we eat? Let’s go through to the next room. It’s cold, but not so damp as upstairs.’
She picked up her satchel and led the way along a passage into the kitchen. There was an old deal table in the middle of the room, thick with fallen flakes of plaster; she began to clear the plaster off.
‘I really do have rabbit-meat sandwiches, by the way,’ she said, as the plaster tumbled. ‘One of my neighbours has a gardener, who traps them. Apparently they’re all over London now. He said he caught this one in Leicester Square! I’m not sure I believe him.’
Helen said, ‘A friend of mine who firewatches says she saw a rabbit, one night, on the platform at Victoria Station; so perhaps he did.’
‘A rabbit at Victoria! Was it waiting for a train?’
‘Yes. Apparently it was looking at its pocket-watch, and seemed awfully het up about something.’
Julia laughed. The laughter was different from the sort of laughter Helen had heard from her before. It was real, unforced—like water welling briefly from a spring—and to have called it up made Helen feel pleased as a child. She said to herself, For goodness’ sake! You’re like a second-former swooning over a prefect! She had to move about to hide her feelings, looking across the dusty jars and pudding moulds on the kitchen shelves while Julia set her bag on the table and rummaged inside it.
The kitchen was an old Victorian one, with long wooden counters and a chipped stone sink. The window had bars before it, like the other, and in between the bars curled ivy. The light was green and very soft. Helen said, as she walked about, ‘You can see the cook and the scullery maids in here.’
‘Yes, can’t you?’
‘And the local policeman, slipping in in the middle of his beat, for his cup of tea.’
‘“No Followers,”’ said Julia, smiling. ‘Come and sit down, Helen.’
She had got out a wax-paper packet of sandwiches, and a night watchman’s bottle of tea. She’d drawn up chairs, but looked dubiously from the dusty seats to Helen’s smartish coat. She said, ‘I could put paper down, if you like.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Helen. ‘Really.’
‘Sure? I’ll take you at your word, you know. I won’t be like Kay about it.’
‘Like Kay?’
‘Laying down my cloak, all of that, like Walter Raleigh.’
It was the first time they had mentioned Kay, and Helen sat without answering. For Kay would have made a fuss about the dust, she thought; and she knew instinctively how tiresome that sort of thing would seem to Julia. It made her aware, more than ever, of the curious situation she was in: that she had accepted a love, a set of attentions, that Julia herself had had the chance to accept first, and had rejected…
Julia unwrapped the sandwiches, drew out the cork from the steaming tea; she’d had the bottle wrapped in a pullover, she said, to keep it hot. She poured a little of the tea into two dainty porcelain cups from one of the cupboards, then swilled it around, to warm the china, threw that away, and poured out more.
The tea was sugary, and very creamy. It must have had all Julia’s ration in it. Helen sipped it, closing her eyes, feeling guilty. When Julia offered her a sandwich she said, ‘I ought to give you money or something for this, Julia.’
Julia said, ‘Really.’
‘I could give you a coupon—’
‘For God’s sake! Is that what this war has done to us? You can buy me a drink some time, if you feel as badly about it as all that.’
They began to eat. The bread was coarse, but the meat sweet and very tender; the flavour was a heavy, distinctive one. Helen realised, after a moment, that it must be garlic. She had tasted garlic in restaurants, but had never cooked with it herself; Julia had bought it, she said as they ate, from a shop on Frith Street, in Soho. She’d managed, too, to get macaroni, olive oil, dried parmesan cheese. And she had a relative in America who sent her parcels of food. ‘You can get more Italian food in Chicago,’ she said, swallowing, ‘than you can in Italy. Joyce sends me olives, and black salad vinegar.’
‘How lucky you are!’ said Helen.
‘I suppose I am. You don’t have any people abroad who could do something like that for you?’
‘Oh, no. My family are all still in Worthing, where I grew up.’
Julia looked surprised. ‘You grew up in Worthing? I didn’t know that. Though I suppose, now I think about it, you had to grow up somewhere…My family has a house near Arundel; we used to swim at Worthing sometimes. Once I ate too many whelks or cockles—or toffee apples, or something—and was vilely sick, all over the pier. What was it like there, growing up?’
‘It was all right,’ said Helen. ‘My family—Well, they’re very ordinary. Did you know that? They’re not—they’re not like Kay’s.’ They’re not like yours, was what she really meant. ‘My father’s an optician. My brother makes lenses for the RAF. My parents’ house—’ She looked around. ‘It isn’t like this house, it isn’t anything like this.’
Perhaps Julia saw that she was embarrassed. She said quietly, ‘Well, but nothing like that matters any more, does it? Not these days. Not now we all dress like scarecrows, and talk like Americans—or else, like chars. “Here’s your grub, ducks,” a girl in a café said to me the other day; I swear she’d been to Roedean, too.’
Helen smiled. ‘It makes people feel better, I suppose. It’s another kind of uniform.’
Julia made a face. ‘I hate this passion for uniforms, too. Uniforms, armbands, badges. I thought the military impulse, as it’s grown up in Germany, was what we were against!’ She sipped her tea, then almost yawned. ‘But perhaps I take the whole thing too seriously.’ She looked at Helen over the rim of her cup. ‘I ought to be like you. Well adjusted, and so on.’
Helen stared, amazed to think that Julia had formed any sort of opinion of her, much less one like that. She said, ‘Is that how I seem? It isn’t how I feel. Well adjusted. I’m not even sure I know what it means.’
‘Well,’ said Julia, ‘you always give the impression of being pretty thoughtful, pretty measured. That’s what I mean. You don’t say much; but what you do say seems to be worth listening to. That’s quite rare, isn’t it?’
‘It must be a trick,’ said Helen lightly. ‘When you’re quiet, people imagine you’re awfully deep. In fact all you’re doing is thinking—I don’t know—how tight your bra is; or wondering whether or not you need the lavatory.’
‘But that,’ said Julia, ‘sounds exactly like good adjustment, to me! Thinking about yourself, rather than the effect you might be having on other people. And the whole—’ She hesitated. ‘Well, the whole grisly “L” business. You know what I mean…You seem to handle that awfully coolly.’
Helen looked down into her cup, and didn’t answer. Julia said, more quietly, ‘How impertinent of me. I’m sorry, Helen.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said Helen quickly, looking up again. ‘I’m not very used to talking about it, that’s all. And I’m not sure, you know, that I’ve ever really thought of it as being much of a business. It was just how things turned out. I didn’t think about it at all, to tell you the truth, when I was younger. Or if I did, I suppose I thought the usual sort of thing: spinster teachers, earnest girls…’
‘There was no one, in Worthing?’
‘Well, there were men.’ Helen laughed. ‘That makes me sound like a call-girl, doesn’t it? There was only one boy, really. I moved to London to be near him; but it didn’t work out. And then I met Kay.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Julia, sipping her tea again. ‘And then you met Kay. And in such terribly romantic circumstances.’
Helen looked at her, trying to gauge her tone and expression. She said shyly, ‘It did seem romantic. Kay’s rather glamorous, isn’t she? At least, she seemed glamorous to me. I’d never met anyone like her before. I’d been in London less than six months then. She made such a—such a fuss of me. And she seemed so certain of what she wanted. That was terribly exciting somehow. It was hard to resist, anyway. It never felt strange, as perhaps it ought to have done…But then, so many impossible things were becoming ordinary, just then.’ She thought back, with a slight shudder, to the night that she and Kay had met. ‘And as impossible things go, being with Kay was, I suppose, quite a mild one.’
She was speaking, she realised, in almost a tone of apology; for she was conscious, still, of what she thought of as a gaucheness in herself, conscious that all the things she was describing to Julia as attractive in Kay were things that Julia herself must have found it easy to resist. Part of her wanted to defend Kay; but part of her, too, wanted to confide in Julia, almost as one wife to another. She’d never spoken like this to anyone. She’d left her own friends behind, when she moved in with Kay; or she kept Kay a secret from them. And Kay’s friends were all like Mickey—all like Kay, in other words. Now she wanted to ask how it had been for Julia, with Kay. She wanted to know if Julia had felt what she herself sometimes, guiltily, felt: that Kay’s constant fussing, which had once been so appealing, so exciting, could also be rather like a burden; that Kay made an absurd kind of heroine of you; that Kay’s passion was so great there was something unreal about it, it could never be matched…
But she didn’t ask any of these things. She looked down into her cup again, and was silent. Julia said, ‘And when the war’s over? And everything goes back to normal?’ And she took refuge, then, in briskness. She shook her head.
‘It’s pointless thinking about that, isn’t it?’ It was what everybody said, to all sorts of questions. ‘We might get blown to bits tomorrow. Until then—well, I’d never want to advertise it. I’d never dream, for example, of telling my mother! But, why should I? It’s a thing between Kay and me. And we’re two grown women. Who does it harm?’
Julia watched her for a moment, then poured more tea from the bottle. She said, as if with a touch of sarcasm, ‘You are well adjusted.’
So then Helen grew embarrassed again. She thought, I’ve said too much, and bored her. She preferred me before, when I was quiet and she thought I was deep…
They sat without speaking, until Julia shivered and rubbed her arms. ‘God!’ she said. ‘This isn’t much fun for you, is it? Me, giving you the third degree, in the basement of a ruined house! It’s like lunch with the Gestapo!’
Helen laughed, her embarrassment fading. ‘No. It’s nice.’
‘Are you sure? I could—Well, I could show you over the whole place, if you like.’
‘Yes, I’d like that.’
They finished their sandwiches and their tea, and Julia tidied away the bottle and the paper and rinsed out the cups. They went back upstairs, going past the doors to the sitting-room and the room behind it, and up the dimly lit staircase to the floors above.
They went softly, sometimes murmuring together over some particular detail or piece of damage, but more often moving about in silence. The rooms on these higher floors were bleaker, even, than the ones downstairs. The bedrooms still had their beds and wardrobes in them, and the wardrobes were damp, because of the broken windows, the ancient clothes inside them eaten through by moths or growing mouldy. Sections of the ceilings had come down. Books and ornaments lay about, ruined. And in the bathroom, a mirror hung on the wall with a weird, blank face: its glass had shattered and fallen, and filled the basin beneath it with a hundred silvery shards.
As they climbed up to the attic floor there was a scuttling, fluttering sound. Julia turned. ‘Pigeons, or mice,’ she said softly. ‘You won’t mind?’
‘Not rats?’ asked Helen apprehensively.
‘Oh, no. At least, I don’t think so.’
She went on, and opened a door. The scuttling changed, became the sound of clapping hands. Peering over Julia’s shoulder, Helen saw a bird fly up and then, as if by magic, disappear. The sloping ceiling had a hole in it, where an incendiary had burned through. The bomb had landed on a feather mattress underneath and made a crater: it looked like an ulcerated leg. You could still smell the bitter scent of burnt, damp feathers.
The room was a housekeeper’s or maid’s. There was a photograph in a frame, on the bedside table, of a little girl. And on the floor was a single slim leather glove, much nibbled by mice.
Helen picked the glove up and did her best to smooth it out. She put it neatly down beside the photograph. She stood for a second looking up through the hole in the ceiling at the close, guncoloured sky. Then she went with Julia to the window, and gazed out at the yard at the back of the house.
The yard was ruined, like everything else: its paving-stones broken, its plants run wild, the column of a sundial blown from its base and lying in pieces.
‘Isn’t it sad?’ said Julia quietly. ‘Look at the fig tree.’
‘Yes. All that fruit!’ For the tree was lolling with broken branches, and the ground beneath it was thick with rotting figs that must have fallen from it and gone uncollected the summer before.
Helen got out cigarettes, and Julia moved closer to her, to take one. They smoked together, their shoulders just touching, the sleeve of Julia’s jacket just catching at Helen’s coat as she raised and lowered her cigarette. Her knuckles were still marked, Helen noticed, from where she’d grazed them the week before; and Helen thought of how, that time, she’d lightly touched them with her fingertips. She and Julia had only been standing together—just standing together, like this. Nothing had happened to make a change. But she couldn’t imagine, now, touching any part of Julia so carelessly as that.
The thought was thrilling, but also frightening. They chatted a little, about the houses that backed on to Bryanston Square; Julia pointed out the ones she had visited, and described the things she’d seen in them. But her sleeve still caught against Helen’s, and it was that brushing and clinging of fabric, rather than Julia’s words, that held Helen’s attention; at last she began to feel the flesh of her arm rising up—as if Julia, or the nearness of Julia, was somehow tugging, drawing at it…
She shivered and moved away. She’d almost finished her cigarette, and made that the excuse. She looked around for somewhere to stub it.
Julia saw. ‘Just drop it, and stamp on it,’ she said.
‘I don’t like to,’ said Helen.
‘It’ll hardly make things worse.’
‘I know, but—’
She took the cigarette to the fireplace, to crush it out there; and she did the same with Julia’s, when Julia had finished. But then she didn’t want to leave the two stubs behind in the empty grate: she waved them about to cool them down, and put them back, with the fresh ones, in her packet.
‘Suppose the people come back?’ she said, when Julia stared at her in disbelief. ‘They won’t like to think that strangers have been in here, looking at their things.’
‘You don’t think they’d be a shade more troubled by the rainwater, the broken windows, the bomb in the bed?’
‘Rain and bomb and windows are just things,’ said Helen. ‘They’re impersonal, not like people…You think I’m silly.’
Julia was gazing at her, shaking her head. ‘On the contrary,’ she said quietly. She was smiling, but sounded almost sad. ‘I was thinking—well, how awfully nice you are.’
They looked at each other for a moment, until Helen lowered her gaze. She put away the packet of cigarettes, then went back across the room to the charred mattress. The room seemed small to her, suddenly: she was very aware of herself and Julia in it, at the top of this chill, silent house—the warmth and the life and the solidness of them, in comparison with so much damage. She could feel the rising, again, of goose pimples, on her arms. She could feel the beating of her own heart, in her throat, her breast, her fingertips…
‘I ought,’ she said, without turning round, ‘to get back to work.’
And Julia laughed. ‘Now you’re nicer than ever,’ she said. But she still sounded sad, somehow. ‘Come on. Let’s go down.’
They went out to the landing and down one flight of stairs. They moved so quietly, still, that when a door was closed, somewhere at the bottom of the house, they heard it, and stopped. Helen’s heart, instead of rushing, seemed to falter. ‘What’s that?’ she whispered, nervously gripping the banister rail.
Julia was frowning. ‘I don’t know.’
But then a man called lightly up the stairs. ‘Julia? Are you there?’—and her expression cleared.
‘It’s my father,’ she said. She leant, and yelled cheerfully into the stairwell: ‘I’m up here, Daddy! Right at the top!—Come and meet him,’ she said, turning back, taking hold of Helen’s hand and squeezing her fingers.
She went quickly down the stairs. Helen followed more slowly. By the time she got down to the hall, Julia was brushing dust from her father’s shoulders and hair, and laughing. ‘Darling, you’re filthy!’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes! Look, Helen, what a state my father’s in. He’s been burrowing through coal cellars…Daddy, this is my friend Miss Helen Giniver. Don’t shake her hand! She thinks we’re a family of mudlarks as it is.’
Mr Standing smiled. He was wearing a dirty blue boiler suit with grubby medal ribbons on the breast. He’d taken off a crumpled-looking cap, and now smoothed down his hair where Julia had disarranged it. He said, ‘How do you do, Miss Giniver? I’m afraid Julia’s right about my hand. Been taking a look around, have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Rum sort of job, isn’t it? All dust. Not like the other war: that was all mud. Makes one wonder what the next one will be. Ashes, I expect…What I should really like to be doing, of course, is putting up new places, rather than grubbing around in these old ones. Still, it keeps me busy. Keeps Julia out of trouble, too.’ He winked. His eyes were dark, as Julia’s were, the lids rather heavy. His hair was grey, but darkened by dirt; his brow and temples were dirty, too—or else freckled, it was hard to see. As he spoke he ran his gaze, in a practised, casual way, over Helen’s figure. ‘Glad to see you taking an interest, anyway. Care to stay, and help?’
Julia said, ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy. Helen has a terribly important job already. She works for the Assistance Board.’
‘The Assistance Board? Really?’ He looked at Helen properly. ‘With Lord Stanley?’
Helen said, ‘Only in the local office, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah. Pity. Stanley and I are old friends.’
He stood chatting with them for another few moments; then, ‘Jolly good,’ he said. ‘I’m off down to the basement, to take a quick look at those plans. If you’ll excuse me, Miss—?’
He stepped around them and headed downstairs. As he moved out of the thickest of the shadows Helen saw that what she’d taken to be dirt, or freckles, on his face, were really the scars of old blisters, from fire or gas.
‘Isn’t he a darling?’ said Julia, when he’d gone. ‘Really, he’s the most awful rogue.’ She opened the door, and she and Helen stood together on the step. She shivered again. ‘It looks like rain. You’ll have to be quick! You know your way back all right? I’d come with you, only—Oh, hang on.’
She’d put her hand, suddenly, on Helen’s shoulder, to keep her from moving on to the pavement, and Helen turned back to her, alarmed—thinking, almost, that Julia meant to kiss her, embrace her, something like that. But all she was doing was brushing dust from Helen’s arm.
‘There,’ she said, smiling. ‘Now, turn around and let me see the back of you. Yes, here’s another bit. Now, the other way. How biddable you are! But we mustn’t give Miss Chisholm any grounds for complaint.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Nor Kay, for that matter…There. That’s splendid.’
They said goodbye. ‘Come and find me some other lunchtime!’ Julia called, as Helen moved off. ‘I’ll be here for two more weeks. We could go to a pub. You can buy me that drink!’
Helen said she would.
She began to walk. Once the door was closed she looked at her wrist-watch, and started to run. She got back to her office at a minute past two. ‘Your first appointment’s waiting, Miss Giniver,’ Miss Chisholm told her, with a glance at the clock; so she didn’t have time, even, to visit the lavatory or comb her hair.
She worked very steadily, for an hour and a half. The job was tiring in times like these. The sort of people she’d been interviewing in the past few weeks were like the people she’d got used to seeing during the big blitz, three years before. Some of them came fresh from the wreckage of their homes, with dirty hands, cut about and bandaged. One woman had been bombed out, she said, three times; she sat on the other side of Helen’s desk and wept.
‘It’s not the house having gone,’ she said. ‘It’s the moving about. I feel like a bit of tinder, miss. I haven’t slept since all this happened. My little boy’s got delicate health. My husband’s in Burma; I’m all on my own.’
‘It’s awfully hard,’ said Helen. She gave the woman a form, and patiently showed her how to complete it. The woman looked at it, not understanding.
‘All this?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘But, if I could just have a pound or two—’
‘I can’t give you money, I’m afraid. You see, it’s a rather lengthy process. We must send a valuer to assess the damage before we can make an advance. We must have someone from our own department see your old home and make a report. I’ll try to get them to the site as quickly as I can, but with all the new raids…’
The woman was gazing, still, at the pieces of paper in her hand. ‘I feel like tinder,’ she said again, passing her hand across her eyes. ‘Just like tinder.’
Helen watched her for a second, then took the form back. She filled in the woman’s details herself, back-dating it all to the month before; and in the space requesting the date and serial number of the valuer’s report, she wrote some likely but vaguely illegible inky figures. She put the form in a tray marked Approved, ready to be sent up to Miss Steadman on the first floor; and she clipped on a note, to say it was urgent.
But she didn’t do anything like that for the next person, or for the people after him. She’d been struck by the woman’s describing herself as being like tinder, that was all. In the first blitz, she’d tried to help everyone; she’d given money to people, sometimes, from her own purse. But the war made you careless. You started off, she thought sadly, imagining you’d be a kind of heroine. You ended up thinking only of yourself.
For at the back of her mind, all afternoon, was the idea of Julia. She was thinking of Julia even as she was comforting the crying woman, even as she was saying, ‘It’s awfully hard.’ She was remembering the feel of Julia’s arm as it brushed against hers; the closeness of Julia, in that small attic room.
Then, at a quarter to four, her telephone rang.
‘Miss Giniver?’ said the girl on reception. ‘An outside call. A Miss Hepburn. Shall I put her through?’
Miss Hepburn? thought Helen, distractedly…Then she understood, and her stomach fluttered with anxiety and guilt. ‘Just a second,’ she said. ‘Ask the caller to hold, will you?’ She put the receiver down, and went to her door and called out: ‘Miss Chisholm? No more applicants, please, just for a minute! I’ve got the Camden Town office on the line.’ She sat back at her desk, and willed herself steady. ‘Hello, Miss Hepburn,’ she said quietly, when the call had been put through.
‘Hello, you.’ It was Kay. They had a sort of game, with names, like that. ‘This is just a nuisance call, I’m afraid.’ Her voice sounded deep, and rather lazy. She was smoking a cigarette: she moved the receiver, to blow out smoke…‘How’s life in Assistance?’
‘Pretty hectic, actually,’ said Helen, glancing at the door. ‘I can’t talk long.’
‘Can’t you? I oughtn’t to have rung, ought I?’
‘Not really.’
‘I’ve been kicking my heels at home. I—Just a minute.’
There was a little puff of air, and then a sense of deadness: Kay had put her palm over the receiver and started to cough. The cough went on. Helen pictured her as she’d often seen her—doubled over, her eyes watering, her face scarlet, her lungs filled up with smoke and brick-dust. She said, ‘Kay? Are you all right?’
‘Still here,’ said Kay, coming back. ‘It’s not so bad.’
‘You oughtn’t to be smoking.’
‘The smoking helps. Hearing your voice helps.’
Helen didn’t answer. She was thinking of the switchboard girl. A friend of Mickey’s had lost her job, when a girl had listened in on a private call between her and her lover.
‘I wish you were here, at home,’ Kay went on. ‘Can’t they get along without you?’
‘You know they can’t.’
‘You have to go, don’t you?’
‘I do, really.’
Kay was smiling: Helen could hear it in her voice. ‘All right. Nothing else to report, though? No one tried to storm the office? Mr Holmes still giving you the eye?’
‘No,’ said Helen, smiling too. Then her stomach fluttered again, and she drew in her breath. ‘Actually—’
‘Hang on,’ said Kay. She moved the receiver, and began to cough again. Helen heard her wiping her mouth. ‘I must let you go,’ she said, when she came back.
‘Yes,’ said Helen leadenly.
‘I’ll see you later. You’re coming straight home? Come quickly, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Good girl…Goodbye, Miss Giniver.’
‘Goodbye, Kay.’
Helen put the receiver down and sat very still. She had a clear image of Kay, getting up, finishing her cigarette, wandering restlessly around the flat, perhaps coughing again. She might stand at the window with her hands in her pockets. She might whistle or hum, old songs from the music hall, ‘Daisy, Daisy’, songs like that. She might put down paper on the sitting-room table, to polish her shoes. She might get out a funny little sailor’s sewing-kit she had, and darn her socks. She didn’t know that Helen, a few hours before, had been standing at a window, feeling the flesh on her arm rise up like the petals of a flower to the sun, because Julia was beside her. She didn’t know that Helen, in a little attic room, had had to turn away from Julia’s gaze, because the quickening of her own blood had made her afraid…
Helen snatched up the telephone again and gave the girl a number. The phone rang twice, and then, ‘Hello,’ said Kay, surprised by Helen’s voice. ‘What did you forget?’
‘Nothing,’ said Helen. ‘I—I wanted to hear you again, that’s all. What were you doing?’
‘I was in the bathroom,’ said Kay. ‘I’d just started to cut my hair. I’ve dropped hair everywhere, now. You’ll hate it.’
‘No I won’t. Kay, I just wanted to tell you—You know, that thing.’
She meant, I love you. Kay was silent for a second, and then said, ‘That thing.’ Her voice had thickened. ‘I wanted to tell you that, too…’
What an absolute idiot I’ve been! thought Helen, when she’d put the phone down again. Her heart felt, now, as though it were swollen inside her, was rising up, like dough, into her throat. She was almost trembling. She got out her handbag and looked for her cigarettes. She found the packet and opened it up.
Inside the packet were those two stubs. She’d put them in there and forgotten. There was lipstick on them, from her own mouth, and from Julia’s.
She put them in the ashtray on her desk. Then she found that the ashtray kept drawing her eye. In the end she took it from the room, and tipped it out into one of the wire bins in Miss Chisholm’s office.
At half-past six, Viv was in the cloakroom at Portman Court. She was standing in a lavatory cubicle, being sick into the bowl. She was sick three times, then straightened up and closed her eyes and, for a minute, felt wonderfully tranquil and well. But when she opened her eyes and saw the lumpy brown mess she’d brought up—a mixture of tea and half-digested Garibaldi biscuits—she retched again. The cloakroom door was opened just as she was coming out to rinse her mouth. It was one of the girls from her own department, a girl called Caroline Graham.
‘I say,’ said the girl, ‘are you all right? Gibson sent me to find you. What’s up? You look rotten.’
Viv wiped her face, gingerly, on an edge of roller-towel. ‘I’m OK.’
‘You don’t look it, honestly. Do you want me to go with you to the nurse?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Viv. ‘Just—just a hangover.’
Caroline heard that, and her manner changed. She leant her hip comfortably against one of the basins, and got out a stick of chewing-gum. ‘Oh,’ she said, folding the stick into her mouth, ‘I know all about those. And crikey, it must have been bad if you’re still throwing up at this hour! I hope the chap was worth it. It’s not so rotten, I always think, if you’ve had a really good time. The worst is, when the boy’s a dud, and you sort of drink just in the hope that it’ll start to make him look better. You want to eat a raw egg or something.’
Viv felt her stomach quiver again. She moved away from the sight of the tumbling grey gum in Caroline’s mouth. ‘I don’t think I could.’ She glanced into the mirror. ‘God, look at the state of me! Have you got any powder on you?’
‘Here,’ said Caroline. She got out a compact and handed it over; and when Viv had used it she took it back and used it herself. Then she stood at the mirror, recurling her hair, the chewing-gum still for a moment; the tip of her tongue showing pinkly between her painted lips, her face smooth and plump with health and youth and the absence of worry: so that Viv looked at her and thought miserably, How bloody mean and unfair life is! I wish I was you.
Caroline caught her gaze. ‘You do look rotten,’ she said, beginning to chew again. ‘Why don’t you stay longer? It’s no skin off my nose. We’ve only got another half-hour, anyway. I could tell Gibson I looked and couldn’t find you. You could say you were collared by Mr Brightman, something like that. He’s always sending girls out for soda-mints.’
‘Thanks,’ said Viv, ‘but I’ll be OK.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
But she’d lowered her head to straighten the waistband of her skirt; and now, in looking up too quickly, she grew queasy again. She put her hand out to one of the basins and closed her eyes—swallowing, swallowing, feeling the gathering of sickness in her stomach and fighting to keep it from rushing up…All at once, it surged. She darted back into the lavatory cubicle and retched drily into the bowl. In that narrow space, the sounds she made seemed dreadful. She tugged on the chain to try and disguise them. When she went back out to the basins, Caroline looked anxious.
‘I think you ought to let me take you to the nurse, Viv.’
‘I can’t go to the nurse with a hangover.’
‘You ought to do something. You look terrible.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ said Viv, ‘in a minute.’
Then she thought of the little journey she’d have to make back up to the typing room: the hard flights of stairs, the corridors. She imagined being sick on one of the polished marble floors. She pictured the typing room itself: the chairs and tables all crowded together, the black-outs up, making everything stuffy, the smells of ink and hair and make-up worse than ever.
‘I wish I could just go home,’ she said miserably.
‘Well, why don’t you? There’s only twenty minutes now.’
‘Shall I? What about Gibson?’
‘I’ll tell her you’re poorly. It’s the truth, isn’t it? Look here, though, what about getting home? Suppose you faint on the way or something?’
‘I don’t think I’ll faint,’ said Viv. But didn’t women faint, when they were—? God! She turned away. She was suddenly afraid that Caroline, in looking at her, would see what the real matter was. She looked at her watch and said, with an effort at calmness, at brightness, ‘Will you do me a favour? I think I’ll wait for Betty Lawrence and walk home with her. Will you tell her, after you’ve told Gibson? Will you say I’ll meet her here?’
‘Of course,’ said Caroline, straightening up, getting ready to go. ‘And don’t forget, about that raw egg. I know it sounds like an awful waste of the ration, but I had a colossal hangover once, on some filthy cocktails a boy mixed up for me at a party; the egg did the trick like you wouldn’t believe. I think Minty Brewster’s got her hands on a couple of eggs; ask her.’
‘I will,’ said Viv, trying to smile. ‘Thanks, Caroline. Oh, and if Gibson asks what the matter is, don’t tell her I’ve been sick, will you? She’s bound to guess—about the hangover, I mean.’
Caroline laughed. She blew out a little grey chewing-gum bubble, and burst it with a pop. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be frightfully female and mysterious, and she’ll think it’s the curse. Will that do?’
Viv nodded, laughing too.
The moment Caroline went out, her laughter died. She felt the flesh on her face sink, grow heavy. The cloakroom had hot pipes running through it, and the air was dry; it felt under pressure, like a room in a submarine. Viv wanted more than anything to be able to open the window and put her face in a breeze. But the lights were on, and the curtain was already drawn: all she could do was go to the side of it and pull the dusty, scratchy cloth around her head like a sort of hood, and get what she could of the chill evening air that was seeping in through gaps in the window-frame.
The window opened on to a courtyard. She could hear typing, the ring of telephones, from rooms on the floors above. If she listened carefully, too, she could just make out, beyond those sounds, the ordinary sounds of Wigmore Street and Portman Square: cars and taxis, and men and women going shopping, going out, going home from work. They were the sort of sounds, Viv thought, that you heard a thousand, thousand times, and never noticed—just as, when you were well, you never thought about being well, you could only really feel what it was like to be healthy for about a minute, when you stopped being sick. But when you were sick, it made you into a stranger, a foreigner in your own land. Everything that was simple and ordinary to everyone else became like an enemy to you. Your own body became like an enemy to you, plotting and scheming against you and setting traps…
She stood at the window, thinking all this, until, at just before seven, the sound of typing faded and was replaced, across the building, by the scrape of wooden chairs on bare floors. A minute after that, the first of the women appeared: they came bowling into the cloakroom to visit the lavatory and get their coats. Viv went out to her locker and, very slowly, put on her own coat, her hat and gloves. She moved between the women like some sort of phantom, gazing at the dullest of them, the plainest of them, the plump and bespectacled, with a mad sort of ravening envy; feeling herself impossibly separated from them and alone. She listened to their clear, confident voices and thought, This is what happens to people like me. I’m just like Duncan, after all. We try to make something of ourselves and life won’t let us, we get tripped up—
Betty appeared. She came in frowning, turning her head. When she saw Viv, she came straight over.
She said, ‘What’s up? Caroline Graham said you couldn’t make it back upstairs. She laid it on as thick as anything for Gibson—said you’d been taken by surprise by something. Now word’s gone round you’ve got the squits.’ She looked Viv over. ‘Hey, you do look bad.’
Viv tried to move away from her gaze as, earlier, she’d tried to move from Caroline’s. She said, ‘I just felt a bit sick.’
‘Poor kid. You need bucking up. I’ve got just the thing for that, too. Jean, from Shipping, has been spreading the word about an MOI party. One of their boys got his divorce papers through today, and they say they need girls. They’ve been hoarding for weeks by the sound of it, so it should be a pretty good blow. We’ve just got time to change; come on.’
Viv looked at her, appalled. ‘You’re joking,’ she said. ‘I can’t manage that. I look like a wreck!’
‘Oh, throw on a bit of Max Factor,’ said Betty as she shrugged on her coat, ‘and the Ministry boys won’t notice.’
She took Viv’s arm and led her out of the room, and they began the journey up to the lobby. Climbing the stairs, Viv found, was awful, like being at sea; but there was a comfort to be had from the feel of Betty’s arm in hers, from being helped and guided. They got to the desk and signed themselves out. The street was not quite dark enough for them to have to switch on their torches. But the evening was cold. Betty stopped for a moment to get out a pair of gloves.
She caught sight of another girl, and lifted one of the gloves and waved it.
‘Jean! Jean, come over here! Tell Viv about this do tonight, will you? She needs persuading.’
The girl called Jean started to walk with them. ‘It should be terrific, Viv,’ she said. ‘They told me to bring as many pals as I could get hold of.’
Viv shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Jean. I can’t, tonight.’
‘Oh, but Viv!’
‘Don’t listen to her, Jean,’ said Betty. ‘She’s not herself.’
‘I’ll say she’s not herself! Viv, they’ve been hoarding for absolute weeks—’
‘I told her that.’
‘I can’t,’ said Viv again. ‘Honestly, I don’t feel up to it.’
‘What’s there to be up to? All those boys are after is a few swell-looking girls in tight sweaters.’
‘No, really.’
‘It isn’t every day a chap gets his divorce through, after all.’
‘No, honestly,’ said Viv, her voice beginning to break, ‘I can’t. I can’t! I—’
She stopped walking, put her hand across her eyes; and there, in the middle of Wigmore Street, she began to cry.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Betty said, ‘Uh-oh. Sorry, Jean. Looks like the party’ll have to do without us after all.’
‘Well, it’s hard luck on those fellows. They’ll be awfully disappointed.’
‘Look at it this way: there’ll be more for you.’
Jean said, ‘That’s a thought, I suppose.’ She touched Viv’s arm. ‘Cheer up, Viv. He must be a rotter, you know, if he makes you feel like this. I’m going to fly back to Johnnie Adam House, girls! If you change your minds, you know where to find me!’ She went off, almost running.
Viv took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. She raised her head, and saw people watching her, mildly curious, as they passed by.
‘I feel such a fool.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Betty gently. ‘We all cry, sometimes. Come on, kid.’ She drew Viv’s arm through hers again, and squeezed her hand. ‘Let’s get you home. What you need’s a nice hot-water bottle, and a gin with a couple of aspirin in it. Come to think of it, that’s what I need, too.’
They began to walk again, more slowly. Viv’s limbs seemed to tingle, almost to buzz, with tiredness. The thought of going back to John Adam House at this time of night, when the place would be in chaos, with chairs being dragged across the dining-room floor, the lights blazing, the wireless blasting out dance-music, girls running up and down the stairs in their underwear, ripping curlers from their hair, calling to one another at the top of their voices—the thought exhausted her.
She pulled at Betty’s arm. ‘I can’t face going back just yet. Let’s go somewhere else, somewhere quiet. Can we?’
‘Well,’ said Betty, doubtfully, ‘we could go to a café, something like that.’
‘I can’t face a café, either,’ said Viv. ‘Can we just sit down somewhere? Just for five minutes?’ Her voice was rising, threatening to break again.
‘All right,’ said Betty, leading her off.
They found themselves, after a short walk, in one of the area’s residential squares, and went into the garden. It was the sort of place that would have been locked to them in the years before the war; now, of course, the railings had gone and they went straight in. They found a bench away from the thickest bushes, on the quietest side of the square. It was not quite dark, but getting darker all the time, and Betty, looking around, said, ‘Well, we’ll either get raped, or someone’ll think we’re a couple of good-time girls and offer us money. I don’t know about you, but if the price was right I might be tempted to take it.’ She still had hold of Viv’s arm. ‘All right, kid,’ she said, as they sat and drew close their coats. ‘Tell me what’s wrong. And remember: I’ve given up the chance of getting groped by an MOI divorcé for this, so it had better be good.’
Viv smiled. But the smile grew almost painful, almost at once. She felt the rising of tears in her throat just as, before, she’d felt the rushing up of sickness. She said, ‘Oh, Betty—’ and her voice dissolved. She put a hand across her mouth, and shook her head. After a second she said in a whisper, ‘I’ll cry, if I say it.’
‘Well,’ said Betty, ‘I’ll cry if you don’t!’ Then, more kindly: ‘All right, I’m not stupid. I’ve a pretty good idea what this is about. Or who, I should say…What’s he done now? Come on, there’s a limit to the kind of thing a man can do to a girl to make her cry. They just don’t have the imagination. He either stands her up, or chucks her over, or knocks her down.’ She snorted. ‘Or knocks her up.’
She said it jokingly, beginning to laugh. Then she met Viv’s gaze through the gathering darkness, and her laughter faded.
‘Oh, Viv,’ she said quietly.
‘I know,’ said Viv.
‘Oh, Viv! When did you find out?’
‘A couple of weeks ago.’
‘A couple of weeks? That’s not so much. Are you sure it’s not just—you know, just a bit late? With all these raids—’
‘No,’ said Viv. She wiped her face. ‘I thought that, at first. But it’s not just that. I know it’s happened. I just know. Look at the state of me…I’ve been sick.’
‘You’ve been sick?’ said Betty, impressed. ‘In the mornings?’
‘Not in the mornings. In the afternoons and at night. My sister was like that. All her friends were sick first thing, but she was sick nearly every night, for three months.’
‘Three months!’ said Betty.
Viv glanced around. ‘Shush, will you?’
‘Sorry. But crikey, kid. What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have you told Reggie?’
Viv looked away. ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Why not? It’s his fault, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not his fault,’ said Viv, looking back. ‘I mean, it’s my fault as much as his.’
‘Your fault?’ said Betty. ‘How’s that? For giving him’—she lowered her voice even further—‘permission to come aboard? That’s all very well, but he should, you know, have worn his raincoat.’
Viv shook her head. ‘It’s been all right, until now. We never use those. He can’t stand them.’
They sat in silence for a second. Then, ‘I think you should tell him,’ said Betty.
‘No,’ said Viv firmly. ‘I’m not telling anyone except you. Don’t you tell anyone, either! God!’ The idea was awful. ‘Suppose Gibson finds out? Remember Felicity Withers?’
Felicity Withers was a Ministry of Works girl who’d got herself pregnant by a Free French airman the year before. She’d thrown herself down the stairs at John Adam House; there’d been the most awful row about it. She’d been dismissed from the Ministry, sent home, back to her parents—a vicar and his wife—in Birmingham.
‘We all said what a nit she was,’ said Viv. ‘God, I wish she was here now! She got—’ She looked around, and spoke in a murmur. ‘She got some pills, didn’t she? From a chemist’s?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Betty.
‘She did,’ said Viv. ‘I’m sure she did.’
‘You could take Epsom salts.’
‘I’ve done that. It didn’t work.’
‘You could try a red-hot bath, and gin.’
Viv almost laughed. ‘At John Adam House? I’d never get the water hot enough. And then, imagine if someone saw, or smelt the gin…I couldn’t do it at my father’s, either.’ She shuddered, just thinking about it. ‘Isn’t there anything else? There must be other things.’
Betty thought it over. ‘You could squirt yourself with soapy water. That’s supposed to work. You have to hit the right spot, though. Or you could use—you know—a knitting needle—’
‘God!’ said Viv, growing sick again. ‘I don’t think I could bear to. Could you, if you were me?’
‘I don’t know. I might, if I were worried enough…Can’t you just—lift weights?’
‘What weights?’ said Viv.
‘Sandbags, things like that? Can’t you jump up and down on the spot?’
Viv thought of the various uncomfortable ordinary journeys she’d had to make in the past two weeks: the bumping about on trains and buses, the flights of stairs she’d climbed at work. ‘That kind of thing won’t do it,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t want to come out like that, I know it doesn’t.’
‘You could soak pennies in drinking-water.’
‘That’s just an old wives’ tale, isn’t it?’
‘Well, don’t old wives know a thing or two? That’s why they’re old wives, after all, and not—’
‘And not old you-know-whats, like me?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
Viv looked away. It was quite dark now. From the pavements beyond the garden there was the occasional blur of shaded torchlight, the shrinking and spreading and darting about of beams. But the tall, flat houses that edged the square were perfectly still. She felt Betty shiver, and shivered herself. But they didn’t get up. Betty drew in her collar and folded her arms. She said, again, ‘You could talk to Reggie.’
‘No,’ said Viv. ‘I’m not going to tell him.’
‘Why not? It’s his, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it is!’
‘Well, I’m only asking.’
‘What a thing to say!’
‘You ought to tell him, though. I’m not being funny, Viv, but the fact is, well, him being a married man…He ought to have an idea of what you could do.’
‘He won’t have a clue,’ said Viv. ‘His wife—she’s kid-crazy. It’s all she wants him for. What he gets from me, it’s different.’
‘I’ll bet it is.’
‘It is!’
‘Well, not in nine months’ time it won’t be. Eight months’ time, I mean.’
‘That’s why I’ve got to fix it by myself,’ said Viv. ‘Don’t you see? If it turns out that, after all, I’m just like her—’
‘And you really want to fix it? You couldn’t—Well, you couldn’t have it, and keep it, or—?’
‘Are you kidding?’ said Viv. ‘My father—It would kill my father!’
It would kill him, she meant, after everything with Duncan. She couldn’t say that, however, to Betty; and suddenly the burden of so many secrets, so much caution and darkness and care, seemed unbearable. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘It’s so bloody unfair! Why does it have to be like this, Betty? As if things weren’t hard enough already! Then this comes along, to make things harder. It’s such a little thing—’
‘I hate to break this to you, kid,’ said Betty, ‘but it won’t be little for long.’
Viv looked at her, through the darkness. She folded her arms across her stomach. ‘That’s what I can’t bear,’ she said quietly, ‘the thought of it inside me, getting bigger and bigger.’ She seemed, all at once, to be able to feel it, sucking at her like a leech. She said, ‘What’s it like? It’s like a fat little worm, isn’t it?’
‘A fat little worm,’ answered Betty, ‘with Reggie’s face.’
‘Don’t say things like that! If I start thinking about it like that, it’ll make it worse. I’ve got to try the pills that Felicity Withers tried.’
‘But they didn’t work for her. That’s why she chucked herself down the stairs! And didn’t they make her sick?’
‘Well, I feel sick, anyway! What’s the difference?’
She didn’t exactly feel sick now, however. She felt agitated, almost feverish. It seemed to her, suddenly, that she’d been living in a kind of trance. She couldn’t believe it. She thought of the days and days that had slipped by, while she’d done nothing. She sat up straighter and looked around.
‘I need a chemist’s shop,’ she said. ‘Where can I find that kind of chemist’s? Betty, come on.’
‘Hang on,’ said Betty. She’d opened her bag. ‘Hell, you can’t just drop this sort of thing on a girl, and then expect her to—Let me just have a cigarette.’
‘A cigarette?’ repeated Viv. ‘How can you be thinking about a cigarette?’
‘Calm down,’ said Betty.
Viv pushed her. ‘I can’t calm down! Do you think you’d be able to calm down, if you were me?’
But all at once she felt exhausted. She slumped back again, and closed her eyes. When she looked up, she found Betty watching her. Her expression, in the darkness, was hard to read. There might have been pity in it, or fascination; even a touch of scorn.
‘What are you thinking?’ Viv asked quietly. ‘You’re thinking I’m soft, aren’t you? Like we said Felicity Withers was.’
Betty shrugged. ‘Any girl can get caught out.’
‘You never have.’
‘God!’ Betty took off her glove and tapped like mad at the bench. ‘Touch wood, can’t you? That’s all it is, after all: just luck, good luck and bad…’ She fished about in her bag again, looking for her lighter. ‘I still say, anyway, that you should tell Reggie. What’s the point of going with a married man, if you can’t tell him things like this?’
‘No,’ said Viv, almost soundlessly. They’d gone back to speaking in murmurs. ‘I’ll try the pills first; and if they don’t work, I’ll tell him then. And then, if they do, he’ll be none the wiser.’
‘Unlike you, hopefully.’
‘You do think I’m soft.’
‘All I’m saying is, if he had worn his raincoat—’
‘He doesn’t like it!’
‘That’s too bad. You can’t muck about, Viv, when you’re a chap in Reggie’s shoes. If he was a single boy it would be different, you could take chances; the worst thing would be, you’d end up married sooner than you meant.’
‘You’re making it sound,’ said Viv miserably, ‘like it’s something you think about, something you plan—like buying a bedroom suite! You know how we feel about each other. It’s like you said just now, about touching wood. He’s only married to another girl through rotten luck, through bad timing. Some things just can’t be helped, that’s all; it’s just how they are.’
‘And it’ll go on being just how things are, for years and years,’ said Betty. ‘And he’ll be grand, thank you very much; and how will you be?’
‘You can’t think like that,’ said Viv. ‘Nobody thinks like that! We might all be dead tomorrow. You have to take what you want, don’t you? What you really want? You don’t know what it’s like. There isn’t anything else for me, except Reggie. If I didn’t have him—’ Her voice thickened. She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘He makes me happy,’ she said, after a minute. ‘You know he does. He makes me laugh.’
Betty finally found her lighter. ‘Well,’ she said, as she struck it, ‘you’re not laughing now.’
Viv watched the spurting up of the flame; she blinked against the plunge back into darkness, and didn’t answer. She and Betty sat almost without speaking until it grew too cold to sit any longer; then they linked arms, wearily, and stood.
They had just moved off across the garden when they heard the sirens go. Betty said, ‘There you are. That’d put an end to all your problems—a nice fat bomb.’
Viv looked up. ‘God, it would. And no one would know, except for you.’
She’d never thought of that before, about all the secrets that the war must have swallowed up, left buried in dust and darkness and silence. She had only ever thought of the raids as tearing things open, making things hard. She kept glancing up at the sky as she and Betty walked to John Adam House, telling herself that she wanted to see the searchlights go up; that she wanted the planes to come, the guns to start, all hell to break loose…
But when the first of the guns began to pound, up in north London somewhere, she grew tense, and made Betty walk faster—afraid of the bombing, even in her wretchedness; afraid of getting hurt; not wanting to die, after all.
Hey, Jerry!’ Giggs was calling out of his window, two hours later. ‘Hey, Fritz! This way! This fucking way!’
‘Shut up, Giggs, you gobshite!’ called someone else.
‘This way, Jerry! Over here!’
Giggs had heard of a prison being bombed, and all the men with less than six months left to serve in it being released; he only had four and a half still to do, and so, every time a raid started up, he’d drag his table across his cell, climb up on to it, and call to the German pilots out of his window. If the raid was a bad one, Duncan found, the shouts could really unsettle you: you began to picture Giggs as something like a great big magnet, sucking bullets and bombs and areoplanes out of the sky. Tonight, however, the raid seemed distant, and no one was much bothered by it. The thuds and flashes were occasional, and soft; the darkness thickened and thinned slightly, that was all, as searchlights swept over the sky. Other men had got up on to their tables and were calling to one another, about ordinary things, across Giggs’s shouts.
‘Woolly! Woolly, you owe me half a dollar, you git!’
‘Mick! Hey, Mick! What are you doing?’
There wasn’t an officer to make them be silent. The officers went straight down into their shelter as soon as a raid started up.
‘You owe me—!’
‘Mick! Hey, Mick!’
The men had to shout themselves almost hoarse, in order to be heard; someone might call from a window at one end of the hall, and be answered by a man fifty cells away. Lying in bed and hearing them yell was like going through the wireless, finding stations in the dark. Duncan almost liked it; he found, at least, that he could filter the voices out when they began to get on his nerves. Fraser, on the other hand, was driven mad by them, every time. Now, for example, he was moving restlessly about, grumbling and cursing. He raised himself up, and punched out the lumps of horsehair in his mattress. He plucked at the bits of uniform he’d laid on his blanket for extra warmth. Duncan couldn’t see him, because the cell was too dark; but he could feel the movement of him through the frame of the bunks. When he lay heavily back down, the bunks rocked from side to side, and creaked and squealed slightly, like bunks in a ship. We might be sailors, Duncan thought.
‘You owe me half a dollar, you cunt!’
‘God!’ said Fraser, raising himself again and punching the mattress more violently. ‘Why can’t they be quiet? Shut up!’ he shouted, slapping the wall.
‘It’s no good,’ said Duncan, yawning. ‘They won’t be able to hear you. Now they’re after Stella, listen.’
For someone had begun calling out: ‘Ste-lla! Ste-lla!’ Duncan thought it was a boy named Pacey, down on the Twos. ‘Ste-lla! I’ve got something to tell you…I saw your twat, in the bath-house! I saw your twat! It was black as my hat!’
Another man whistled and laughed. ‘You’re a fucking poet, Pacey!’
‘It looked like a fucking black rat with its throat cut! It looked like your old man’s beard, with your old girl’s fat fucking lips in the middle! Ste-lla! Why don’t you answer?’
‘She can’t answer,’ came another voice. ‘She’s got her gob on Mr Chase!’
‘She’s got her gob round Chase,’ said someone else, ‘and Browning is slipping her a length from the back. She’s got her fucking hands full, boys!’
‘Shut up, you naughty things!’ cried a new voice. It was Monica, on the Threes.
Pacey started on her, then. ‘Moni-ca! Moni-ca!’
‘Shut up, you beasts! Can’t a girl get her beauty sleep?’
This was followed by the crump! of a distant explosion and, ‘Jerry!’ Giggs called again. ‘Fritz! Adolf! This way!’
Fraser groaned and turned his pillow. Then, ‘Hell!’ he said. ‘That’s all we need!’
For on top of everything else, somebody had started singing.
‘Little girl in blue, I’ve been dreaming of you…Little girl in blue…’
It was a man called Miller. He was in for running some sort of racket from a nightclub. He sang all the time, with horrible sincerity, as if crooning into a microphone at the front of a band. At the sound of his voice now, men up and down the hall began to complain.
‘Turn it off!’
‘Miller, you bastard!’
Duncan’s neighbour, Quigley, began to beat with something—his salt-pot, probably—on the floor of his cell. ‘Shut up,’ he roared as he did it, ‘you fucking slags! Miller, you cunt!’
‘I’ve been dreaming of you…’
Miller sang on, through all the complaints, through all the distant roar of the raid; and the worst of it was, the song was tuneful. One by one, the men fell silent, as if they were listening. Even Quigley, after a while, threw down his salt-pot and stopped roaring.
I hear your voice, I reach to hold you,
Your lips touch mine, my arms enfold you.
But then you’re gone: I wake and find
That I’ve been drea-ming…
Fraser, too, had grown still. He’d lifted his head, the better to hear. ‘Hell, Pearce,’ he said now. ‘I think I danced to this tune once. I’m sure I did.’ He lay back down. ‘I probably laughed at the bloody thing, then. Now—now it seems stinkingly apt, doesn’t it? Christ! Trust Miller and a popular song to be so honest about longing.’
Duncan said nothing. The song went on.
Though we’re apart, I can’t forget you.
I bless the hour that I first met you—
Abruptly, another voice broke across it. This one was deep, tuneless, lusty.
Give me a girl with eyes of blue,
Who likes it if you don’t but prefers it if you do!
Someone cheered. Fraser said, in a tone of disbelief, ‘Who the hell is that, now?’
Duncan tilted his head, to listen. ‘I don’t know. Maybe Atkin?’
Atkin, like Giggs, was a deserter. The song sounded like something a serviceman would sing.
Give me a girl with eyes of black,
Who likes it on her belly but prefers it on her back!
’Cause I’ll be seeing you again, when you—
Miller was still going. For almost a minute the two songs ran bizarrely together; then Miller gave in. His voice trailed away. ‘You wanker!’ he yelled. There were more cheers. Atkin’s voice—or whosever it was—grew louder, lustier. He must have been cupping his hands around his mouth and bellowing like a bull.
Give me a girl with hair of brown,
Who likes it going up but prefers it coming down!
Give me a girl with hair of red,
Who likes it in the hand but prefers it in the bed!
Give me a—
But then the Raiders Past siren started up. Atkin turned his song into a whoop. Men on every landing joined in, drumming with their fists on their walls, their window-frames, their beds. Only Giggs was disappointed.
‘Come back, you gobshites!’ he called, hoarsely. ‘Come back, you German cunts! You forgot D Hall! You forgot D Hall!’
‘Get down out of those fucking windows!’ roared someone out in the yard, and there was the rapid crunch, crunch of boots on cinders, as the officers emerged from their shelter and started heading towards the prison. From all along the hall, then, there came the thump and scrape of tables: the men were leaping down from their windows, hurling themselves back into their bunks. In another minute, the electric lights were switched on. Mr Browning and Mr Chase came pounding up the stairs and started racing down the landings, hammering on doors, flinging open spy-holes: ‘Pacey! Wright! Malone, you little shit—If I catch any of you fuckers out of your beds, the whole lot of you’ll be banged up from now till Christmas, do you hear?’
Fraser turned his face into his pillow, groaning and cursing against the light. Duncan drew up his blanket over his eyes. Their door was thumped, but the racing footsteps went past. They faded for a moment; stopped; grew loud, then faded again. Duncan had a sense of Mr Browning and Mr Chase turning snarling about, thwarted and furious, like dogs on chains. ‘You shit-cakes!’ one of them cried, for show. ‘I’m warning you—!’
They paced back and forth along the landings for another minute or two; eventually, however, they tramped down the stairs. In another moment, with a little phut, the lights in the cells were switched off again.
Duncan quickly put down his blanket and moved his head to the edge of his pillow. He liked the moment when the current was cut. He liked to see the bulb in the ceiling. For the light faded slowly, and for three or four seconds, if you watched for it, you could make out the filament inside the glass, a curl of wire that turned from white to furious amber, to burning red, to delicate pink; and then, when the cell was dark, you could still see the yellow blur of it inside your eye.
A man gave a whistle, quietly. Someone shouted to Atkin. He wanted Atkin to carry on singing. He wanted to know about the girl whose hair was yellow—what did she like? What about her? He called it twice, three times; but Atkin wouldn’t answer. The matey, mischievous feeling that had gripped them all, ten minutes before, was losing its hold. The silence was deepening, growing daunting, and to try to break into it, now, was to make it seem worse. For after all, thought Duncan, you could sing or bellow as much as you liked; it was only a way of putting off this moment—this moment that always, finally, came—when the loneliness of the prison night rose up about you, like water in a sinking boat.
He could still hear the words of the songs, however—just as he’d still been able to see the glowing filament in the bulb against the darkness of his own eyelids. Give me a girl, he could hear in his head. Give me a girl, and I’ll be seeing you, over and over.
Perhaps Fraser could hear it, too. He changed his pose, rolled on to his back, kept fidgeting. Now that the place was so quiet, when he passed his hand across the stubble on his chin—when he rubbed his eye, even, with his knuckle—Duncan heard it…He blew out his breath.
‘Damn,’ he said, very softly. ‘I wish I had a girl, Pearce, right now. Just an ordinary girl. Not the kind of girls I used to meet—the brainy types.’ He laughed, and the frame of the bunks gave a shiver. ‘God,’ he said, ‘isn’t that a phrase to freeze a man’s blood? “A brainy girl.”’ He put on a voice. ‘“You’d like my friend, she’s ever so brainy.” As if that’s what one wants them for…’ He laughed again—a sort of snigger, this time, too low to make the bed-frame jump. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘just an ordinary little girl is what I’d like right now. She wouldn’t have to be pretty. Sometimes the pretty ones are no good—do you know what I mean? They think too much of themselves; they don’t want to mess their hair up, smudge their lips. I wish I had a plain, stout, stupid girl. A plain, stout, stupid, grateful girl. Do you know what I’d do with her, Pearce?’
He wasn’t talking to Duncan, really; he was talking to the darkness, to himself. He might have been murmuring in his sleep. But the effect was more intimate, somehow, than if he’d been whispering into Duncan’s ear. Duncan opened his eyes and gazed into the perfect, velvety blackness of the cell. There was a depthlessness to it that was so unnerving, he put up his hand. He wanted to remind himself of the distance between his and Fraser’s bunk: he’d begun to feel as though Fraser was nearer than he ought to have been; and he was very aware of his own body as a sort of duplication or echo of the one above…When his fingers found the criss-crossed wire underside of Fraser’s bed, he kept them there. He said, ‘Don’t think about it. Go to sleep.’
‘No, but seriously,’ Fraser went on, ‘do you know what I’d do? I’d have her, fully clothed. I wouldn’t take off a stitch. I’d only loosen a button or two at the back of her dress—and I’d undo her brassière, while I was about it—and then I’d draw the dress and the brassière down to her elbows and get my fingers on to her chest. I’d give her a pinch. I might pull her about a bit—there wouldn’t be a thing she could do if I did, for the dress—do you see?—the dress would be pinning her arms to her sides…And when I’d finished with her chest, I’d push up her skirt. I’d push it right up to her waist. I’d keep the knickers on her, but they’d be that silky, flimsy kind that you can work your way about, work your way up…’ The words trailed away. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, was bare and not at all boastful. ‘I had a girl like that, once. I’ve never forgotten it. She wasn’t a beauty.’
He fell silent. Then, ‘Damn,’ he said softly again. ‘Damn, damn.’ And he moved about, so that the wires supporting his mattress flexed and tightened, and Duncan quickly drew back his fingers. He had rolled on to his side, Duncan thought; but though he lay still, there was a tension to him—something charged and furtive, as if he might be holding his breath, calculating. And when he moved again, to draw up the blanket, the movement seemed false, seemed stagey: as if it was being made, elaborately, to conceal another, more secret…
He had put his hand, Duncan knew, to his cock; and after another moment he began, with a subtle, even motion, to stroke it.
It was a thing men did all the time, in prison. They made a joke of it, a sport of it, a boast of it; Duncan had once shared a cell with a boy who had done it, not even at night, with a blanket to cover him, but during the day, obscenely. He had learnt to turn his head from it, just as he’d learnt to turn his head from the sight and sound and smell of other men belching, farting, pissing, shitting into pots. Now, however, in the utter darkness of the cell, and in the queer, uneasy atmosphere raised by Miller’s and Atkin’s singing, he found himself horribly aware of the stealthy, helpless, purposeful, half-ashamed motion of Fraser’s hand. For a moment or two he kept quite still, not wanting to betray the fact that he was awake. Then he found that his stillness only made his senses more acute: he could hear the slight thickening, now, of Fraser’s breath; he could smell him as he sweated; he could even catch, he thought, the faint, wet, regular sound—like a ticking watch—of the tip of Fraser’s cock being rhythmically uncovered…He couldn’t help it. He felt his own cock give a twitch and begin to grow hard. He lay another minute, perfectly still save for that gathering and tightening of flesh between his legs; then he made the same sort of stealthy, stagey movements that Fraser had: pulled up the blanket over himself, slid his hand into his pyjamas, and took the base of his cock in his fist.
But his other hand, he raised. He found the wires of Fraser’s bed again and just touched them with his knuckles, lightly at first; then he caught the tension in them, the hectic little jolts and quivers they were giving in response to the regular jog-jog-jog of Fraser’s fist. He worked one of his fingers about them—clinging to them, almost, with the tip of that one finger; bracing himself against them, as he tugged with his other hand at his cock.
He was aware, after a minute or so of this, of Fraser giving a shudder, and of the wires beneath his mattress growing still; but he couldn’t have stopped his own hand, then, for anything, and a moment later his own spunk rushed: he felt the travelling and bursting of it as if it were hot and scalded him. He thought he made a sound, as it came; it might just have been the roaring of the blood through his ears…But when the roaring died, there was only the silence: the awful, abashing stillness of the prison night. It was like emerging from some sort of fit, a spell of madness; he thought of what he’d just done and imagined himself pounding, gasping, plucking at Fraser’s bunk like some kind of beast.
Only after a minute did Fraser move. There was the rustle of bedclothes, and Duncan guessed he was wiping spunk from himself with his sheet. But the rustling went on, the movement became tense, almost savage; finally, Fraser struck his pillow.
‘Damn this place,’ he said, as he did it, ‘for turning us all into schoolboys! Do you hear me, Pearce? I suppose you liked that. Did you, Pearce? Hey?’
‘No,’ said Duncan at last—but his mouth was dry, and his tongue caught against his palate. The word came out as a sort of whisper.
Then he flinched. The bed-frame had rocked, and something warm and light had struck him, in the face. He put up his hand, and felt a sticky kind of wetness on his cheek. Fraser must have leant over the edge of the bunk and flicked spunk at him.
‘You liked it all right,’ said Fraser bitterly. His voice was close, for a moment. Then he moved back beneath his blanket. ‘You liked it all right, you blasted bugger.’