She came to the bottom of Charing Cross Road and began to go up it. In front of her she saw the curtains of brick that hid the entrances to Leicester Square Tube Station. By one of them, on the opposite side of the road, someone was standing. She was still not conscious of any shock of surprise or of fear or even of relief. Her emotions were not in action. There had been no one; there was now someone. It was not Richard; it was another young woman. She crossed the road towards the unknown; it seemed the thing to do. Unknown? not unknown. It was—and now she did feel a faint surprise—it was Evelyn. In the sudden recollection of having arranged to meet Evelyn there, she almost forgot that she was dead. But then she remembered that their actual meeting had been accidental. They had both happened to be on their way to their appointed place. As she remembered, she felt a sudden renewal of the pain and of the oblivion. It did not remain. There was nothing to do but go on. She went on.
The figure of Evelyn moved and came towards her. The sound of her heels was at first hideously loud on the pavement as she came, but after a step or two it dwindled to almost nothing. Lester hardly noticed the noise at the time or its diminution; her sense was in her eyes. She absorbed the approaching form as it neared her with a growing intensity which caused her almost to forget Richard. The second best was now the only best. As they drew together, she could not find anything to say beyond what she had said a hundred times—dull and careless, “O hallo, Evelyn!” The sound of the words scared her, but much more the immediate intolerable anxiety about the reply: would it come? It did come. The shape of her friend said in a shaking voice, “O hallo, Lester!”
They stopped and looked at each other. Lester could not find it possible to speak of their present state. Evelyn stood before her, a little shorter than she, with her rather pinched face and quick glancing black eyes. Her black hair was covered by a small green hat. She wore a green coat; and her hands were fidgeting with each other. Lester saw at once that she also was without a handbag. This lack of what, for both of them, was almost, if not quite, part of their very dress, something without which they were never seen in public; this loss of handkerchief, compact, keys, money, letters, left them peculiarly desolate. They had nothing but themselves and what they wore—no property, no convenience. Lester felt nervous of the loss of her dress itself; she clutched it defensively. Without her handbag she was doubly forlorn in this empty City. But Evelyn was there and Evelyn was something. They could, each of them, whatever was to happen, meet it with something human close by. Poor deserted vagrants as they were, they could at least be companions in their wanderings.
She said, “So you’re here!” and felt a little cheered. Perhaps soon she would be able to utter the word death. Lester had no lack of courage. She had always been willing, as it is called, “to face facts”; indeed, her chief danger had been that, in a life with no particular crisis and no particular meaning, she would invent for herself facts to face. She had the common, vague idea of her age that if your sexual life was all right you were all right, and she had the common vague idea of all ages that if you (and your sexual life) were not all right, it was probably someone else’s fault—perhaps undeliberate, but still their fault. Her irritation with her husband had been much more the result of power seeking material than mere fretfulness. Her courage and her power, when she saw Evelyn, stirred; she half prepared a part for them to play—frankness, exploration, daring. Oh if it could but have been with Richard!
Evelyn was speaking. Her quick and yet inaccurate voice rippled in words and slurred them. She said, “You have been a long time. I quite thought you wouldn’t be coming. I’ve been waiting—you can’t think how long. Let’s go into the Park and sit down.”
Lester was about to answer when she was appalled by the mere flat ordinariness of the words. She had been gripping to herself so long her final loss of Richard that she had gripped also the new state in which they were. This talk of sitting down in the Park came over her like a nightmare, with a nightmare’s horror of unreality become actual. She saw before her the entrance to the station and she remembered they had meant to go somewhere by Tube. She began, with an equal idiocy, to say, “But weren’t we——” when Evelyn gripped her arm. Lester disliked being held; she disliked Evelyn holding her; now she disliked it more than ever. Her flesh shrank. Her eyes were on the station entrance and the repulsion of her flesh spread. There was the entrance; they had meant to go—yes, but there could not now be any Tube below; or it would be as empty as the street. A medieval would have feared other things in such a moment—the way perhaps to the città dolente, or the people of it, smooth or hairy, tusked or clawed, malicious or lustful, creeping and clambering up from the lower depths. She did not think of that, but she did think of the spaces and what might fill them; what but the dead? Perhaps—in a flash she saw them—perhaps there the people, the dead people, of this empty City were; perhaps that was where the whole population had been lying, waiting for her too, the entrance waiting and all below the entrance. There were things her courage could not face. Evelyn’s clutch on her arm was light, light out of all proportion to the fear in Evelyn’s eyes, but in her own fear she yielded to it. She allowed herself to be led away.
They went into the Park; they found a seat; they sat down. Evelyn had begun to talk, and now she went on. Lester had always known Evelyn talked a good deal, but she had never listened to more than she chose. Now she could not help listening, and she had never before heard Evelyn gabble like this. The voice was small and thin as it usually was, but it was speedier and much more continuous. It was like a river; no, it was like something thrown about on a river, twisted and tossed. It had no pressure; it had no weight. But it went on. She was saying—“that we wouldn’t go to see it today, after all. I mean, there aren’t many people about and I do hate an empty theater, don’t you? Even a cinema. It always seems different. I hate not being with people. Should we go and see Betty? I know you don’t much care for Betty, or her mother. I don’t like her mother myself, though of course with Betty she must have had a very difficult time. I wish I could have done more for her, but I did try. I’m really very fond of Betty and I’ve always said that there was some simple explanation for that odd business with the little German refugee a year or two ago. Naturally I never said anything to her about it, because she’s almost morbidly shy, isn’t she? I did hear that that painter had been there several times lately; what’s his name? Drayton; he’s a friend of your husband, isn’t he? but I shouldn’t think he——”
Lester said—if she said; she was not certain, but she seemed to say, “Be quiet, Evelyn.”
The voice stopped. Lester knew that she had stopped it. She could not herself say more. The stillness of the City was immediately present again and for a moment she almost regretted her words. But of the two she knew she preferred the immense, the inimical stillness to that insensate babble. Death as death was preferable to death mimicking a foolish life. She sat, almost defiantly, silent; they both sat silent. Presently Lester heard by her side a small and curious noise. She looked round. Evelyn was sitting there crying as Lester had cried, the tears running down her face, and the small noise came from her mouth. She was shaking all over and her teeth were knocking together. That was the noise.
Lester looked at her. Once she would have been impatient or sympathetic. She felt that, even now, she might be either, but in fact she was neither. There was Evelyn, crying and chattering; well, there was Evelyn crying and chattering. It was not a matter that seemed relevant. She looked away again. They went on sitting.
The first shadow of another night was in the sky. There was never any sun, so it could not sink. There was a moon, but a moon of some difference, for it gave no light. It was large and bright and cold, and it hung in the sky, but there was no moonlight on the ground. The lights in the houses would come on and then go out. It was certainly growing darker. By her side the chattering went on; the crying became more full of despair. Lester dimly remembered that she would once have been as irritated by
it as all but the truly compassionate always are by misery. Now she was not. She said nothing; she did nothing. She could not help being aware of Evelyn, and a slow recollection of her past with Evelyn forced itself on her mind. She knew she had never really liked Evelyn, but Evelyn had been a habit, almost a drug, with which she filled spare hours. Evelyn usually did what Lester wanted. She would talk gossip which Lester did not quite like to talk, but did rather like to hear talked, because she could then listen to it while despising it. She kept Lester up to date in all her less decent curiosities. She came because she was invited and stayed because she was needed. They went out together because it suited them; they had been going out that afternoon because it suited them; and now they were dead and sitting in the Park because it had suited someone or something else—someone who had let a weakness into the plane or had not been able to manage the plane, or perhaps this City of façades which in a mere magnetic emptiness had drawn them to be there, just there.
Still motionlessly gazing across the darkening Park, Lester thought again of Richard. If Richard had been in distress by her side—not, of course, crying and chattering, more likely dumb and rigid—would she have done anything? She thought probably not. But she might, she certainly might, have cried to him. She would have expected him to help her. But she could not think of it; the pang took her quickly; he was not there and could not be. Well … the pang continued, but she was growing used to it. She knew she would have to get used to it.
The voice by her side spoke again. It said, through its sobs, the sobs catching and interrupting it, “Lester! Lester, I’m so frightened.” And then again, “Lester, why won’t you let me talk?”
Lester began, “Why——” and had to pause, for in the shadow her voice was dreadful to her. It did not sound like a voice; only like an echo. In the apparent daylight, it had not been so bad, but in this twilight it seemed only like something that, if it was happening at all, was happening elsewhere. It could not hold any meaning, for all meaning had been left behind; in her flat perhaps which she would never occupy again; or perhaps with the other dead in the tunnels of the Tube; or perhaps farther away yet, with whatever it was that had drawn them there and would draw them farther; this was only a little way—Oh what else remained to know?
She paused, but she would not be defeated. She forced herself to speak; she could and would dare that at least. She said, “Why … Why do you want to talk now?”
The other voice said, “I can’t help it. It’s getting so dark. Let’s go on talking. We can’t do anything else.”
Lester felt again the small weak hand on her arm and now she had time to feel it; nothing else intervened. She hated the contact. Evelyn’s hand might have been the hand of some pleading lover whose touch made her flesh creep. She had, once or twice in her proud life, been caught like that; once in a taxi—the present touch brought sharply back that other clasp, in this very Park on a summer evening. She had only just not snapped into irritation and resentment then; but in some ways she had liked the unfortunate man and they had been dining pleasantly enough. She had remained kind; she had endured the fingers feeling up her wrist, her whole body loathing them, until she could with sufficient decency disengage herself. It was her first conscious recollection of an incident in her past—that act of pure courtesy, though she did not then recognize it either as recollection or as a courtesy. Only for a moment she thought she saw a taxi race through the Park away before her, and she thought it could not be and was not. But she stiffened herself now against her instinctive shrinking and let her arm lie still, while the feeble hand clutched and pawed at her.
Her apprehension quickened as she did so. To be what she was, to be in this state of death, was bad enough, but at the same time to feel the dead, to endure the clinging of the dead, being dead to know the dead—the live man in the taxi was far better than this, this that was Evelyn, the gabbing voice, the chattering teeth, the helpless sobs, the crawling fingers. But she had gone out with Evelyn much more than with the man in the taxi; her heart acknowledged a debt. She continued to sit still. She said in a voice touched by pity if not by compassion, “It’s no good talking, especially like that. Don’t you understand?”
Evelyn answered, resentfully choking, but still holding on. “I was only telling you about Betty, and it’s all quite true. And no one can hear me except you, so it doesn’t matter.”
No one could hear; it was true enough—unless indeed the City heard, unless the distant façades, and the nearer façade of trees and grass, were listening, unless they had in them just that reality at least, a capacity to overhear and oversee. The thin nothingness could perhaps hear and know. Lester felt all about her a strange attention, and Evelyn herself, as if frightened by her own words, gave a hasty look round, and then burst again into a hysterical monologue: “Isn’t it funny—we’re all alone? We never thought we’d be alone like this, did we? But I only said what was quite true, even if I do hate Betty. I hate everyone except you; of course I don’t hate you; I’m very fond of you. You won’t go away, will you? It’s nearly dark again and I hate it when it’s dark. You don’t know what the dark was like before you came. Why are we here like this? I haven’t done anything. I haven’t; I tell you I haven’t. I haven’t done anything.”
The last word rose like a wail in the night, almost (as in the old tales) as if a protesting ghost was loosed and fled, in a cry as thin as its own tenuous wisp of existence, through the irresponsive air of a dark world, where its own justification was its only, and worst, accusation. So high and shrill was the wail that Lester felt as though Evelyn herself must have been torn away and have vanished, but it was not so. The fingers still clutched her wrist and Evelyn still sat there, crying and ejaculating, without strength to cry louder. “I haven’t done anything, anything. I haven’t done anything at all.”
And what then could be done now? If neither Evelyn nor she herself had ever of old done anything, what could or should they do now—with nothing and no one about them? with only the shell of a City, and they themselves but shell and perhaps not even true shell? only a faint memory and a pang worse than memory? It was too much to bear. As if provoked by an ancient impetuosity of rage, Lester sprang to her feet; shell or body, she sprang up and the motion tore her from the hand that held her. She took a step away. Better go alone than sit so companioned; and then as her foot moved to the second step she paused. Evelyn had failed again, “Oh don’t go! don’t go!” Lester felt herself again thrusting Richard away and she paused. She looked back over her shoulder; half in anger and half in pity, in fear and scorn and tenderness, she looked back. She saw Evelyn, Evelyn instead of Richard. She stared down at the other girl and she exclaimed aloud, “Oh my God!”
It was the kind of casual exclamation she and Richard had been in the habit of throwing about all over the place. It meant nothing; when they were seriously aggressive or aggrieved, they used language borrowed from bestiality or hell. She had never thought it meant anything. But in this air every word meant something, meant itself; and this curious new exactitude of speech hung there like a strange language, as if she had sworn in Spanish or Pushtu, and the oath had echoed into an invocation. Nothing now happened; no one came; not a quiver disturbed the night, but for a moment she felt as if someone might come, or perhaps not even that—no more than a sudden sense that she was listening as if to hear if it was raining. She was becoming strange to herself; her words, even her intonations, were foreign. In a foreign land she was speaking a foreign tongue; she spoke and did not know what she said. Her mouth was uttering its own habits, but the meaning of those habits was not her own. She did not recognize what she used. “I haven’t done anything … Oh my God!” This was how they talked and it was a great precise prehistoric language forming itself out of the noises their mouths made. She articulated the speech of Adam or Seth or Noah and only dimly recognized the intelligibility of it. She exclaimed again, despairingly, “Richard!” and that word she did know. It was the only word common to her an
d the City in which she stood. As she spoke, she almost saw his face, himself saying something, and she thought she would have understood that meaning, for his face was part of the meaning, as it always had been, and she had lived with that meaning—loved, desired, denounced it. Something intelligible and great loomed and was gone. She was silent. She turned; she said, more gently than she had spoken before, “Evelyn, let’s do something now.”
“But I haven’t done anything,” Evelyn sobbed again. The precise words sounded round them and Lester answered their meaning.
“No,” she said, “I know. Nor have I—much.” She had for six months kept house for Richard and herself and meant it. She had meant it; quarrels and bickerings could not alter that; even the throwing it away could not alter it. She lifted her head; it was as certain as any of the stars now above her in the sky. For the second time she felt—apart from Evelyn—her past present with her. The first had been in the sense of that shadowy taxi racing through the Park, but this was stronger and more fixed. She lived more easily for that moment. She said again, “Not very much. Let’s go.”
“But where can we go?” Evelyn cried. “Where are we? It’s so horrible.”
Lester looked round her. She saw the stars; she saw the lights; she saw dim shapes of houses and trees in a landscape which was less familiar through being so familiar. She could not even yet manage to enunciate to her companion the word death. The landscape of death lay round them; the future of death awaited them. Let them go to it; let them do something. She thought of her own flat and of Richard—no. She did not wish to take this other Evelyn there; besides, she herself would be, if anything at all, only a dim shadow to Richard, a hallucination or a troubling apparition. She could not bear that, if it could be avoided; she could not bear to be only a terrifying dream. No; they must go elsewhere. She wondered if Evelyn felt in the same way about her own home. She knew that Evelyn had continuously snubbed and suppressed her mother, with whom she lived; once or twice she had herself meant to say something, if only out of an indifferent superiority. But the indifference had beaten the superiority. It was now for Evelyn to choose.
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