by Sarah Waters
‘You caught the broadcast last night?’ Ursula was saying.
‘Of course,’ said Julia.
‘Rather good, wasn’t it? Did you think so, Helen? I think we did awfully well. And wasn’t it tremendous, seeing Julia’s face in the middle of the Radio Times!’
‘Oh, it was rotten,’ said Julia, before Helen could answer. ‘That picture’s so frightfully Catholic! I look like I’m about to be bound to a wheel, or have my eyes put out!’
‘Nonsense!’
They laughed together. Then Julia said, ‘Look here, Ursula. Why don’t you join us?’
Ursula shook her head. ‘I know if I sit, I simply shan’t want to get up. I shall be sick with envy, though, thinking about you all day. It’s just too disgustingly clever of you both. But of course, you live so very near. And such a charming house, too!’ She spoke to Helen again. ‘I said to Julia, one would never know such a place existed, so close to the Edgware Road.’
‘You’ve seen it?’ asked Helen in surprise.
‘Oh, just for a moment—’
Julia said, ‘Ursula called round, one day last week. Surely I told you, Helen?’
‘I must have forgotten.’
‘I wanted to take a peek,’ said Ursula, ‘at Julia’s study. It’s always so fascinating, I think, seeing where writers do their work. Though I’m not sure whether I really envy you, Helen. I don’t know how I’d feel, having my friend scribbling away over my head, working out the best way to despatch her next victim—by poison, or the rope!’
She said the word ‘friend’, Helen thought, in a special sort of way—as if to say: We understand one another, of course. As if to say, in fact: We’re all ‘friends’ together. She had taken off her gloves, to bring out a silver cigarette-case from her pocket; and as she opened the case up Helen saw her short manicured nails, and the discreet little signet ring on the smallest finger of her left hand.
She held the cigarettes out. Helen shook her head. Julia, however, moved forward, and she and Ursula spent a moment fussing with a lighter—for a breeze had risen and kept blowing out the flame.
They spoke further about Armchair Detective and the Radio Times; about the BBC and Ursula’s job there. Then, ‘Well, my dears,’ said Ursula, when her cigarette was finished, ‘I must be off. It’s been so nice. You must both come over, some time, to Clapham. You must come for supper—or, better still, I could put together a bit of a party.’ Her gaze grew mischievous again. ‘We could make it an all-girl thing. What do you say?’
‘But of course, we’d love to,’ said Julia, when Helen said nothing.
Ursula beamed. ‘That’s settled, then. I’ll let you know.’ She took Julia’s hand and playfully shook it. ‘I’ve one or two friends who would be thrilled to meet you, Julia. They’re such fans!’ She started putting on her gloves, and turned to Helen again. ‘Goodbye, Helen. It’s been so nice to meet you properly.’
‘Well,’ said Julia, as she sat back down. She was watching Ursula making her quick, smart way across the park in the direction of Portland Place.
‘Yes,’ said Helen, rather thinly.
‘Amusing, isn’t she?’
‘I suppose so. Of course, she’s more your class than mine.’
Julia looked round, laughing. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘She’s a bit hearty, is all I meant…When did you take her to the house?’
‘Just last week. I told you, Helen.’
‘Did you?’
‘You don’t think I did it in secret?’
‘No,’ said Helen quickly. ‘No.’
‘It was only for a minute.’
‘She’s not how I imagined. I thought you told me she was married.’
‘She is married. Her husband’s a barrister. They live apart.’
‘I didn’t know she was—well,’ Helen lowered her voice, ‘like us.’
Julia shrugged. ‘I don’t know what she is, really. A bit of an oddity, I think. Still, that party might be fun.’
Helen looked at her. ‘You wouldn’t want to go, really?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘I thought you were just being polite. “An all-girl thing.” You know what that means.’ She looked down, her colour rising slightly. ‘Anyone might be there.’
Julia didn’t answer for a moment. When she spoke, she sounded impatient or annoyed. ‘Well, what if they are? It won’t kill us. It might even be fun. Imagine that!’
‘It’ll certainly be fun for Ursula Waring, anyway,’ said Helen, before she could stop herself. ‘Having you there, like some sort of prize pig—’
Julia was watching her. She said coldly, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And then, when Helen wouldn’t answer: ‘It’s not—Oh, no.’ She began to laugh. ‘Not really, Helen? Not because of Ursula?’
Helen moved away. ‘No,’ she said; and she lay back down, with a sharp, graceless movement. She put her arm across her eyes, to keep off the sun and Julia’s gaze. After a moment she felt Julia lie down, too. She must have reached into the bag and brought out her book: Helen heard her leafing through its pages, looking for her place.
But what Helen could see, in the shifting blood-coloured depths of her own eyelids, was Ursula Waring’s mischievous dark gaze. She saw the way that Ursula and Julia had stood together, lighting their cigarettes. She saw again Ursula playfully shaking Julia’s hand. Then she thought back. She remembered how keen Julia had been to get to the park—Come on! Come quick!—her fingers slipping away from Helen’s in her impatience. Was it Ursula she’d wanted to see? Was it? Had they arranged the whole thing?
Her heart beat faster. Ten minutes before she had been lying just like this, enjoying the familiar, secret nearness of Julia’s limbs. She’d wanted to hold on to that moment, make a crystal bead of it. Now the bead felt shattered. For what was Julia to her, after all? She couldn’t lean to her and kiss her. What could she do, to say to the world that Julia was hers? What did she have, to keep Julia faithful? She had only herself: her pressed-meat thighs, her onion face…
These thoughts raged through her like a darkness in her blood, while Julia read on; while the band played a final parp-parp-parp, then put its instruments away; while the sun crept slowly over the sky, and shadows extended themselves across the yellow ground. But at last the miserable panic subsided. The darkness shrank, folded itself up. She said to herself, What an idiot you are! Julia loves you. It’s only this beast in you she hates, this ridiculous monster—
She moved her wrist again, so that it just touched Julia’s thigh. Julia kept still for a moment, then moved her own wrist, to meet it. She put down her book and propped herself up. She took up an apple and a knife. She peeled the apple in one long strip, then cut the fruit into quarters and handed two of them to Helen. They ate together, watching the running about of dogs and children, as they had before.
Then they caught each other’s gaze. Julia said, with a hint of coolness still, ‘All over, now?’
Helen coloured. ‘Yes, Julia.’
Julia smiled. When she’d finished eating the apple she lay back down, and picked up her book again; and Helen watched her as she read. Her eyes were moving from word to word, but apart from that her face was still, closed, blemishless as wax.
You look like a film-star,’ said Reggie, as Viv got into his car. He made a show of looking her over. ‘Can I have your autograph?’
‘Just get going, will you?’ she said. She’d been standing in the sun, waiting for him, for half an hour. They moved together and briefly kissed. He let down the handbrake and the car moved off.
She was wearing a light cotton dress and a plum-coloured cardigan, and sunglasses with pale plastic frames; instead of a hat she had a white silk scarf, which she’d tied in a knot beneath her chin. The scarf and the sunglasses looked striking against the dark of her hair and the red of her lipstick. She straightened her skirt, making herself comfortable, then wound down her window and sat with her elbow on the sill, her face in the draught—lik
e a girl in an American picture, just as Reggie had said. Slowing the car for a traffic-light, he put his hand on her thigh and murmured admiringly, ‘Oh, if the boys in Hendon could only see me now!’
But of course, he kept well away from north London. He’d picked her up at Waterloo and, having crossed the river and got to the Strand, he headed east. They had places they liked, an hour from the city: villages in Middlesex and Kent, where there were pubs and tea-rooms; little beaches on the coast. Today they were motoring out towards Chelmsford; they were just going to drive until they found a pretty spot. They had hours together: all afternoon. She’d told her father she was going on a picnic with a girlfriend. She’d stood at one end of the kitchen table the night before, making sandwiches, while he’d sat at the other fixing rubber soles to his shoes.
They wove through the City and Whitechapel; when they started on a wider, smoother road Reggie put the car in a higher gear and moved his hand back to her thigh. He found the line of her suspender, and began to follow it; her dress being thin, she could feel the pressure of his touch—his thumb and palm and moving finger—as vividly as if she’d been naked.
But her mood was wrong, somehow. She said, ‘Don’t,’ and caught his hand.
He gave a groan like a man in torment and pretended to fight against her grip. ‘What a teaser you are! Can I stop the car? It’s that, you know, or run it off the road.’
He didn’t stop the car. He speeded up. The streets grew clearer. Billboards appeared at the side of the road, advertising Players, Please! and Wrigley’s, ‘Jiffy’ Dyes, and Vim. She sat more loosely, watching the peeling back of the city—the blitzed Victorian high streets giving way to red Edwardian villas, the villas giving way to neat little houses like so many bowler-hatted clerks, the little houses becoming bungalows and prefabs. It was like hurtling backwards through time—except that the bungalows and prefabs turned into open green fields, and after that, she thought, if you narrowed your eyes and didn’t look at things like telegraph poles or aeroplanes in the sky, you could have been in any time, or no time at all.
They passed a pub, and Reggie worked his mouth as if thirsty. He’d laid out his jacket on the back seat, but got her to reach into its pocket and bring out a little flask of Scotch. She watched him lifting it to his mouth. His lips were soft and smooth; his chin and throat were freshly shaved, but already dark with dots of stubble. He drank clumsily, concentrating on the road. Once the whisky ran from the corner of his mouth and he had to catch it with the back of his swarthy hand.
‘Look at you,’ she said, half playfully, half crossly. ‘You’re dribbling.’
He said, ‘I’m drooling. It’s from sitting next to you.’
She made a face at the idea. They drove on more or less in silence. He kept to the main road for almost an hour, but then, coming to an unsigned junction, followed the quietest-looking route; and after that they took the lanes that caught their fancy. London, suddenly, became almost unimaginable—the hardness and dryness and dirt of it. The hedges that bordered the lanes were high and moist and, though it was autumn, still filled with colour: sometimes Reggie drew close to the side to let another driver pass, and flowers shook their petals through the window into Viv’s lap. Once a white butterfly came into the car and spread out its papery, powdery wings on the curve of the seat beside her shoulder.
Her mood began to lift. They started to point out little things to each other—old-fashioned churches, quaint-looking cottages. They remembered a day, years before, when they had come into the country and stopped at a cottage and spoken to its owner, and he’d taken them for a married couple and asked them into his parlour and given them glasses of milk. Reggie said now, as he slowed the car before a little house the colour of creamy French cheese, ‘There’s space at the back, look, for pigs and chickens. I can see you, Viv, chucking out the swill. I can see you picking apples in an orchard. You could make me apple pies, and bloody great suet puddings.’
‘You’d get fat,’ she said, smiling, poking his stomach.
He dodged away from her. ‘It wouldn’t matter. You’re supposed to be fat, aren’t you, in the country?’ He kept an eye on the road, but dipped his head to look at the upstairs window. He lowered his voice. ‘I bet there’s the hell of a feather mattress in the room up there.’
‘Is that all you think about?’
‘It is, when you’re around.—Oops.’
He swerved, to avoid the hedge, then put his foot down again.
They began to look about for a place to stop the car and eat their lunch, and took a track that led between fields towards a wood. The track seemed well maintained at first; the further they drove, however, the rougher and narrower it grew. The car bumped about, getting whipped by brambles, and long grass swept and crackled underneath it like rushing water beneath a boat. Viv bounced on the seat, laughing. Reggie frowned, leaning forward, tugging at the steering-wheel. ‘If we meet someone coming the other way, we’re buggered,’ he said. And she knew he was thinking about what would happen if they were to have an accident, smash up the car, get stuck…
But the track dipped and turned and they found themselves, all at once, in a lush green clearing beside a stream, breathtakingly pretty. Reggie put on the brake and turned off the engine; they sat for a moment, amazed and awed by the quiet of the place. Even after they’d opened the doors and begun to climb out they hesitated, feeling like intruders: for all they could hear was the tumbling of the stream, the calling of birds, the shushing of leaves.
‘It sure as hell ain’t Piccadilly,’ said Reggie, getting out at last.
‘It’s lovely,’ said Viv.
They spoke almost in murmurs. They stretched their arms and legs, then walked across the grass to the edge of the stream. When they gazed along the bank they could see, half hidden in the trees, an old stone building with shattered windows and a broken roof.
‘That’s a mill,’ said Reggie, moving towards it, catching hold of Viv’s hand. ‘Can you see the shaft of the wheel? This must have been a proper river once.’
She pulled him back. ‘Someone might be there.’
But no one was there. The house had been abandoned years before. Grass grew through the gaps between its flagstones. Pigeons fluttered in its beams, and its floors were covered with bird droppings and broken slate and glass. Somebody, at some point, had cleared a space and made a fire; there were cans and bottles, and filthy messages on the walls. The cans were rusty, the bottles silvery with age.
‘Tramps,’ said Reggie. ‘Tramps, or deserters. And courting couples.’ They went back to the stream. ‘I bet this is a regular Lovers’ Lane.’
She gave him a pinch. ‘Trust you to find it, then.’
He still had hold of her hand. He lifted her fingers to his lips, looking coy, pretending modesty. ‘What can I say? Some men are gifted like that, that’s all.’
They were talking, now, in normal voices, had lost their sense of awe and caution and begun to feel as though the place was theirs: that it had been waiting, picturesquely, just for them to come and claim it. They followed the stream in the other direction and found a bridge. They stood on the hump of it, smoking cigarettes; Reggie put his arm around her waist and rested his hand on her backside, moving his thumb, making her dress and her petticoat slide against the silk of her knickers.
They threw the ends of their cigarettes into the stream and watched them race. Then Reggie peered more closely at the water.
‘There’s fish in there,’ he said. ‘Big sods, look at that!’ He went down to the side of the stream, took off his wrist-watch and dipped in his hand. ‘I can feel them nibbling!’ He was as excited as a boy. ‘They’re like a bunch of girls, all kissing! They think my hand’s a man-fish. They think their luck’s in!’
‘They think you’re lunch,’ Viv called back. ‘They’ll have one of your fingers if you’re not careful.’
He leered. ‘That’s like a girl, too.’
‘The sort of girls you know, maybe.’
‘Now look what you’ve done!’
They went back to the car for their picnic, leaving the car’s doors open. Reggie got out a tartan rug from the boot and they spread it on the grass. He brought out a bottle of gin and orange, too, and a couple of beakers—one pink, one green. The beakers were meant for children, Viv knew: they were rough against the lip where they’d been bitten and thrown about. But she was used to that sort of thing; there was simply no point minding. The gin and orange had become warm in the car: she swallowed, and felt the glow of it almost at once, loosening her up. She unwrapped the sandwiches. Reggie ate his in great, quick bites, swallowing the bread before he’d chewed it, then biting again; talking with the food still on his tongue.
‘This is that Canadian ham, isn’t it? It’s not too bad after all.’
He’d pulled at his tie, undone the button of his shirt. The sun was on him, making him frown, showing up the creases in his forehead and beside his nose. He was thirty-six, but had recently, Viv thought, begun to look a little older. His face was sallow—that was the Italian blood in him—and his hazel eyes were still very handsome, but he was losing his hair—losing it not neatly, in a round little patch; it was thinning all over, his scalp here and there showing luminously through. His teeth, which were straight and very even, and which Viv remembered as having once been dazzlingly white, were turning yellow. The flesh of his throat was getting loose; there were folds in the skin in front of his ears. He looks like his father, she thought, watching him chew. He’d shown her a picture once. He could be forty, at least.