by Sarah Waters
She took off her coat and her hat, and they sat down. Mr Mundy had gone back out to the kitchen. There came the sounds of him, after a minute, preparing tea.
‘I ought to go and give a hand,’ she said. She said this every time she came. And Duncan always answered, as he did now, ‘He prefers it on his own. He’ll start up singing in a minute. He had his treatment this afternoon; he’s a little bit better. Anyway, I’ll do the washing up. Tell me how you are.’
They exchanged their little pieces of news.
‘Dad sends his love,’ she said.
‘Does he?’ He wasn’t interested. He’d only been seated for a moment, but now he got up excitedly and brought something down to her from a shelf. ‘Look at this,’ he said. It was a little cop-perish jug, with a dent in its side. ‘I got it on Sunday, for three and six. The man asked seven shillings, and I knocked him down. I think it must be eighteenth-century. Imagine ladies, V, taking tea, pouring cream from this! It would have been silvered then, of course. Do you see where the plating’s come off?’ He showed her the traces of silver at the join of the handle. ‘Isn’t it lovely? Three and six! That bit of damage is nothing. I could knock that out if I wanted.’
He turned the jug in his hands, delighted with it. It looked like a piece of rubbish to Viv. But he had some new object to show her every time she came: a broken cup, a chipped enamel box, a cushion of napless velvet. She could never help thinking of the mouths that had touched the china, the grubby hands and sweating heads that had rubbed the cushions bald. Mr Mundy’s house, itself, rather gave her the creeps: an old person’s house, it was, its little rooms crowded with great dark furniture, its walls swarming with pictures. On the mantelpiece were flowers of wax and pieces of coral under spotted glass domes. The lamps were gas ones still, with fish-tail flames. There were yellow, exhausted photographs: of Mr Mundy as a slim young man; another of him as a boy, with his sister and mother, his mother in a stiff black dress, like Queen Victoria. It was all dead, dead, dead; and yet here was Duncan, with his quick dark eyes, his clear boy’s laugh, quite at home amongst it all.
She picked up her bag. ‘I’ve brought you something.’
It was a tin of ham. He saw it and said, ‘I say!’ He said it in the affectionate, faintly teasing way he’d said smart lady secretary, before; and when Mr Mundy came limping in with the tea-tray, he held the tin up extravagantly.
‘Look here, Uncle Horace! Look what Viv has brought us.’
There was corned beef on the tray, already. She had brought that last time. Mr Mundy said, ‘By golly, we are well set up now, aren’t we?’
They pulled out the leaves of the table and put out the plates and cups, the tomato sandwiches, the lettuce-hearts and cream crackers. They drew up their chairs, shook out their napkins, and began to help themselves to the food.
‘How is your father, Vivien?’ Mr Mundy asked politely. ‘And your sister? How’s that fat little chap?’ He meant Pamela’s baby, Graham. ‘Such a fat little chap, isn’t he? Fat as butter! Quite like the kids you used to see about when I was a boy. Seemed to go out of fashion.’
He was opening the tin of ham as he spoke: turning its key over and over with his great, blunt fingers, producing a line of exposed meat like a thin pink wound. Viv saw Duncan watching; she saw him blink and look away. He said, as if with a show of brightness, ‘Are there fashions in babies, then, like in skirts?’
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Mr Mundy, shaking out the ham, scooping out the jelly. ‘What you never used to see, that was wheeled perambulators. You saw a wheeled perambulator round here, that was something marvellous. That was what you used to call top-drawer. We used to cart my cousins about in a wagon meant for coal. Kids walked sooner then, though. Kids earned their living in those days.’
‘Were you ever sent up a chimney, Uncle Horace?’ asked Duncan.
‘A chimney?’ Mr Mundy blinked.
‘By a great big brute of a man, setting fire to your toes to make you go faster?’
‘Get away with you!’
They laughed. The empty ham tin was set aside. Mr Mundy took out his handkerchief and blew his nose—blew it short and hard like a trumpet—then shook the handkerchief back into its folds and put it neatly back in his pocket. His sandwiches and lettuce-hearts he cut into fussy little pieces before he ate them. When Viv left the lid of the mustard-pot up, he tipped it down. But the slivers of meat and jelly that were left on his plate at the end of the meal he held to the cat: he let her lick them from his hand—lick all about his knuckles and nails.
When the cat had finished, she mewed for more. Her mew was thin, high-pitched.
‘She sounds like pins,’ said Duncan.
‘Pins?’
‘I feel as though she’s pricking me.’
Mr Mundy didn’t understand. He reached to touch the cat’s head. ‘She’ll scratch you, mind, when her dander’s up. Won’t you, Catty?’
There was cake to be eaten, after that; but as soon as the cake was finished, Mr Mundy and Duncan got up and cleared the cups and plates away. Viv sat there rather tensely, watching them carrying things about; soon they went out to the kitchen together and left her alone. The doors in the house were heavy and cut off sound; the room seemed quiet and dreadfully airless, the gas-lamps hissing, a grandfather clock in the corner giving a steady tick-tick. It sounded laboured, she thought—as though its works had got stiff, like Mr Mundy’s; or else, as if it felt weighted down by the old-fashioned atmosphere, like her. She checked the face of it against her wrist-watch. Twenty to eight…How slowly the time ran here. As slowly as at work. How unfair it was! For she knew that later—when she would want it—it would seem to rush.
Tonight, at least, there was a distraction. Mr Mundy came in and sat down in his armchair beside the fire, as he always did after dinner; Duncan, however, wanted Viv to cut his hair. They went out to the kitchen. He put down newspaper on the floor, and set a chair in the middle. He filled a bowl with warm water, and tucked a towel into the collar of his shirt.
Viv dipped a comb in the water, wet his hair, and started cutting. She used a pair of old dressmaking scissors; God knows what Mr Mundy was doing with those. Probably he did his own sewing, she wouldn’t put it past him. The newspaper crackled under her shoes as she moved about.
‘Not too short,’ said Duncan, hearing her clip.
She turned his head. ‘Keep still.’
‘You did it too short last time.’
‘I’ll do it how I do it. There is such a thing as a barber’s, you know.’
‘I don’t like the barber’s. I always think he’s going to cut me up and put me in a pie.’
‘Don’t be silly. Why would he want to do that?’
‘Don’t you think I’d make a nice pie?’
‘There’s not enough meat on you.’
‘He’d make a sandwich of me, then. Or he’d put me in one of those little tins. And then—’ He turned and caught her eye, looking mischievous.
She straightened his head again. ‘It’ll end up crooked.’
‘It doesn’t matter, there’s no one to see. Only Len, at the factory. I haven’t got any admirers. I’m not like you—’
‘Will you shut up?’
He laughed. ‘Uncle Horace can’t hear. He wouldn’t mind, even if he could. He doesn’t trouble over things like that.’
She stopped cutting and put the point of the scissors to his shoulder. ‘You haven’t told him, Duncan?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’
‘Don’t you, ever!’
‘Cross my heart.’ He licked his finger, touched his chest; looked up at her, still smiling.
She wouldn’t smile back. ‘It isn’t a thing to joke about.’
‘If you can’t joke about it, why do you do it?’
‘If Dad should hear—’
‘You’re always thinking about Dad.’
‘Well, somebody has to.’
‘It’s your life, isn’t it?’
‘Is
it? I wonder, sometimes.’
She cut on in silence—unsettled, but wanting to say more; almost hoping that he’d keep teasing her, for she had no one else to talk to; he was the only person she’d told. But she left it too long; he got distracted, tilting his head to look at the damp black locks on the newspaper under his chair. They’d fallen as curls, but as they dried they were separating into individual strands and growing fluffy. She saw him grimace.
‘Isn’t it queer,’ he said, ‘how nice one’s hair is when it’s on one’s head; and how gruesome it becomes, the instant it’s cut off. You ought to take one of those curls, V, and put it in a locket. That’s what a proper sister would do.’
She straightened his head again, less gently than before. ‘I’ll proper sister you in a minute, if you don’t keep still.’
He put on a silly Cockney voice. ‘I was proper sistered!’
That made them laugh. When she’d finished cutting he moved the chair aside and opened the back door. She got her cigarettes, and they sat together on the step, gazing out, smoking and chatting. He told her about his visit to Mr Leonard’s; about the buses he and Mr Mundy had had to take, their little adventures…The sky was like water with blue ink in it, the darkness sinking, stars appearing one by one. The moon was a slim and perfect crescent, almost new. The little cat appeared, and wound herself around their legs, then threw herself on to her back and writhed, ecstatic again.
Then Mr Mundy came out from the parlour—came out to see what they were doing, Viv supposed; had perhaps heard them laughing, through the window. He saw Duncan’s hair and said, ‘My word! That’s a bit better, now, than the cuts you used to get from Mr Sweet!’
Duncan got up and started tidying the kitchen. He made a parcel of the paper and the hair. ‘Mr Sweet,’ he said, ‘used to nip you with his scissors, just for fun.’ He rubbed his neck. ‘They said he took a man’s ear off once!’
‘That was all talk,’ said Mr Mundy comfortably. ‘Prison talk: that’s all that was.’
‘Well, that’s what a man told me.’
They quarrelled about it for another minute or two; Viv had the feeling they were almost doing it on purpose—showing off, in some funny way, because she was there. If only Mr Mundy hadn’t come out! He couldn’t leave Duncan alone for a minute. She’d liked it, sitting on the step, watching the sky get darker. But she couldn’t bear it when they started talking so airily about prison, all of that; it set her teeth on edge. The closeness and the fondness she’d felt for Duncan a moment before began to recede. She thought of her father. She found herself thinking in her father’s voice. Duncan moved gracefully across the kitchen and she looked at his neat dark head, his slender neck, his face that was handsome as a girl’s, and she said to herself almost bitterly: All he put us through, look, and there’s not a bloody mark on him!
She had to go back into the parlour and finish her cigarette there, on her own.
But there wasn’t any point in getting worked up about it. It would wear her out, just as it had worn out her father. And she had other things to think about. Duncan made more tea, and they listened to a programme on the wireless; and at quarter-past nine she put her coat on. She left at the same time every week. Duncan and Mr Mundy stood at the front door to watch her go, like an old married couple.
‘You don’t want your brother to walk you to the station?’ Mr Mundy would ask her; and Duncan would answer before she could, in a negligent sort of way, ‘Oh, she’s all right. Aren’t you, Viv?’
But tonight he kissed her, too, as if aware that he’d annoyed her. ‘Thanks for the haircut,’ he said quietly. ‘Thanks for the ham. I was only teasing, before.’
She looked back twice as she went off, and they were still there, watching; the next time she looked, the door was closed. She imagined Mr Mundy with his hand on Duncan’s shoulder; she pictured them going slowly back into the parlour—Duncan to one armchair, Mr Mundy to the other. She felt again the airless, flannel-like atmosphere of the house on her skin, and walked more briskly—growing excited, suddenly; liking the chill of the evening air and the crispness of the sound of her heels on the pavement.
Walking quickly, however, meant that she arrived too soon at the station. She had to stand about in the ticket-hall while trains came and went, feeling horribly exposed in the harsh, dead light. A boy tried to catch her eye. ‘Hey, Beauty,’ he kept saying. He kept going past her, singing. To put herself out of his way she went to the bookstall; and it was only as she was looking over the rack of magazines that she remembered what Helen had said, that afternoon, about the Radio Times. She took down a copy and opened it up, and almost at once found an article headed:
DANGEROUS GLANCES
URSULA WARING introduces Julia Standing’s thrilling new novel, The Bright Eyes of Danger, featured on Armchair Detective at 10.10 on Friday evening (Light Prog.).
The article was several columns long, and gave an account of the novel in very glowing terms. Above it was a photograph of Julia herself: her face tilted, her eyes downcast, her hands raised and pressed together at the side of her jaw.
Viv looked at the photo with a touch of dislike: for she’d met Julia once, in the street outside the office, and had not taken to her. She’d seemed too clever—shaking Viv’s hand when Helen introduced them, but not saying, ‘How do you do?’ or ‘Pleased to meet you,’ or anything like that; saying coolly instead, as if she’d known Viv for years: ‘Successful day? Have you got heaps of people married?’ ‘More fool them if we have,’ Viv had answered; and at that she’d laughed, as if at a joke of her own, and said, ‘Yes, indeed…’ Her voice was very well-to-do, and yet she’d talked slangily: ‘louse up your plans’, ‘go dotty’. What Helen, who was so nice, saw in her to like so much, Viv couldn’t imagine. But then, that was their own business. Viv closed her mind to it.
She put the magazine back in the rack and moved away. There was no sign, now, of the boy who’d sung at her. The clock showed two minutes to half-past ten. She went across the ticket-hall—not towards the platforms, but back to the station entrance. She stood close to a pillar, looking out into the street: drawing her coat more tightly around her because, with so much standing about, she’d got chilled.
A moment later a car drew slowly up to the kerb; it came to a stop a few yards on, away from the worst glare of the station. She could see its driver as it passed, dipping his head, trying to spot her. He looked anxious, handsome, hopeless: she found herself feeling towards him much of what she’d felt towards Duncan, earlier on; the same mix of love and exasperation. But there was still that edge of excitement there, too: it rose again now, and grew sharper. She glanced up and down the street, then more or less ran to the passenger door. Reggie leant across and opened it; and as she climbed inside he reached for her face, and kissed her.
Back at Lavender Hill, Kay was walking. She’d been walking, more or less, all afternoon and evening. She’d walked in a great, rough sort of circle, from Wandsworth Bridge up to Kensington, across to Chiswick, over the river to Mortlake and Putney, and now she was heading back to Mr Leonard’s; she was two or three streets from home. In the last few minutes she’d fallen into step, and into conversation, with a fair-haired girl. The girl, however, wasn’t much good.
‘I wonder you can go so fast, in heels so high,’ Kay was saying.
‘One gets into the habit, I suppose,’ the girl answered carelessly. ‘There’s not much to it. You’d be surprised.’ She wasn’t looking at Kay, she was looking ahead, along the street. She was meeting a friend, she said.
‘I’ve heard it’s as good an exercise,’ Kay persisted, ‘as riding a horse. That it’s good for the shape of the legs.’
‘I couldn’t really say.’
‘Well, perhaps your boyfriend could.’
‘I might ask him.’
‘I wonder he hasn’t told you so already.’
The girl laughed. ‘Like to wonder, don’t you?’
‘It makes one think, looking at you, that’s all
.’
‘Does it?’
The girl turned to Kay and met her gaze for a second—frowning, not understanding, not understanding at all…Then, ‘There’s my friend!’ she said, and she raised her arm to another girl across the street. She went on faster, to the edge of the kerb, looked quickly to left and to right, then ran across the road. Her high-heeled shoes were pale at the instep; they showed, Kay thought, like the whitish flashes of fur you saw on the behinds of hopping rabbits.
She hadn’t said ‘Goodbye’, ‘So long’, or anything like that; and she didn’t, now, look back. She had forgotten Kay already. She took the other girl’s arm, and they turned down a street and were lost.
TWO
Where’s your best girl?’ Len asked Duncan across the bench, at the candle factory at Shepherd’s Bush. He meant Mrs Alexander, the factory’s owner. ‘She’s late today. Have you had a tiff?’
Duncan smiled and shook his head, as if to say, Don’t be silly.
But Len ignored him. He nudged the woman who sat next to him and said, ‘Duncan and Mrs Alexander have had a row. Mrs Alexander caught Duncan making eyes at another girl!’
‘Duncan’s a real heart-breaker,’ said the woman good-humouredly.
Duncan shook his head again, and got on with his work.
It was a Saturday morning. There were twelve of them at the bench, and they were all making night lights, threading wicks and metal sustainers into little stubs of wax, then putting the stubs in flame-proof cases ready for the packers. In the centre of the bench there ran a belt, which carried the finished lights away to a waiting cart. The belt moved with a trundling sound and a regular squeak—not very noisily but, when combined with the hiss and clatter from the candle-making machines in the other half of the room, just noisily enough so that, if you wanted to speak to your neighbour, you had to raise your voice a little louder than was really comfortable. Duncan found it easier to smile and gesture. Often he’d go for hours without speaking at all.