by Sarah Waters
‘Quite sure. No one’s looking at all. See for yourself.’
Duncan hesitated, then put his hand across his eyes and peered between his fingers. And it was true. The man and the woman had disappeared and a quite different couple were sitting at their table. This man had sandy-coloured hair; he was pouring crumbs into his mouth from a bag of crisps. The woman was yawning: patting at her lips with a plump white hand. The rest of the drinkers were talking amongst themselves, or gazing back into the bar, or out at the water—gazing anywhere, in fact, but at Duncan.
Duncan let out his breath, and his shoulders sank. He didn’t know what to think now. For all he knew, he might have imagined the whole thing. He didn’t care. His panic had drained him, emptied him out. He wiped his face again and said shakily, wretchedly, ‘I ought to go home.’
‘In a minute,’ said Fraser. ‘Drink some of this beer, first.’
‘All right. But you’ll—you’ll have to pour it.’
Fraser lifted the jug and filled their glasses. Duncan took a gulp, and then another. He had to hold his glass with two hands, to keep it from spilling. In time, however, he began to feel calmer. He wiped his mouth and glanced at Fraser.
‘I suppose you must think me a bit of a fool.’
‘Don’t talk tripe! Don’t you remember—?’
Duncan spoke over his words. ‘I’m not used, you see, to going about like this, on my own. I’m not like you.’
Fraser shook his head, as if annoyed or exasperated. He looked at Duncan, then looked away. He shifted his pose, drank more of his beer. Finally he said, very awkwardly, ‘I wish, Pearce, that I’d kept in touch with you. I wish I’d written, more than I did. I—I let you down. I see that now, and I’m sorry. I let you down badly. But that year, in the Scrubs: once I’d got out, it seemed—I don’t know—it seemed like a dream.’ He met Duncan’s gaze, his eyelids fluttering. ‘Do you understand me? It seemed like someone else’s life, not mine. It was just as though I’d been plucked right out of time, then dropped back in it, and had to take up where I left off.’
Duncan nodded. He said slowly, ‘It wasn’t like that, for me. When I came out, everything was different. Everything was changed. I’d always known it would be, and it was. People said, “You’ll do all right.” But I knew I never would.’
They sat without speaking, as if both exhausted. Fraser got out his matches and his pipe. And now the flame showed brightly, the day was darkening. He rolled down his sleeves and fastened his cuffs, and Duncan felt him shiver.
They watched the movement of the river. The surface of the water, in just a few minutes, had lost its hectic, restless look. The shore had narrowed further already, the water creeping forwards as if, like a cat’s rough tongue, it was wearing the land away with every stroke and lap. Then a tug went rapidly by, and made waves: they rushed and were sucked back, then rushed again; then wore themselves out and ran more feebly.
Fraser threw a stone. He said, ‘How does Arnold have it? The eternal note of sadness—is it? And the something naked shingles of the world…’ He passed his hand over his face, laughing at himself. ‘Christ, Pearce, the moment I start quoting poetry, we’re done for! Come on.’ He levered himself up. ‘Forget the beer, and let’s go. I’ll walk you home. Right to the door. And you can introduce me to your—Uncle Horace, was it?’
Duncan thought of Mr Mundy, pacing the parlour, coming limping to answer their ring. But he hadn’t the energy, now, for fear or embarrassment or anything like that. He got to his feet, and followed Fraser up the water-stairs; and they started off together, northwards, towards White City, through the steadily darkening streets.
THREE
Don’t you know the war’s over?’ the man behind the counter in a baker’s shop asked Kay.
He said it because of her trousers and hair, trying to be funny; but she had heard this sort of thing a thousand times, and it was hard to smile. When he caught her accent, anyway, his manner changed. He handed over the bag, saying, ‘There you are, madam.’ But he must have given some sort of look behind her back because, as she went out, the other customers laughed.
She was used to that, too. She tucked the bag under her arm and put her hands in her trouser pockets. The best thing to do was brazen it out, throw back your head, walk with a swagger, make a ‘character’ of yourself. It was tiring, sometimes, when you hadn’t the energy for it; that’s all.
Today, as it happened, her spirits were rather high. The idea had come to her, that morning, to pay a visit to a friend. She’d walked from Lavender Hill to Bayswater, and was now heading up the Harrow Road. Her friend, Mickey, worked in a garage there, as an attendant on the pumps.
Kay could see her in the forecourt of the garage as she drew closer: Mickey had set up a canvas chair, and was lounging in it reading a book. Her legs were spread out, for she was dressed, not exactly mannishly, as Kay was, but like a boy-mechanic, in dungarees and boots. Her hair was fair, the colour and texture of dirty rope; it was sticking up as if she had just got out of bed. As Kay watched, she licked a finger and turned a page. She didn’t hear Kay coming, and Kay walked towards her with a queer sort of stirring in her heart. It was simply the pleasure of seeing a friend, after seeing, for weeks at a time, only strangers; that’s all it was. But for a second Kay thought the feeling was going to expand up into her throat and make her cry. She imagined how ridiculous she’d look to Mickey, turning up out of the blue like this, in tears. And she thought seriously of giving the whole thing up—slipping away before Mickey should see her.
Then the feeling shrank back down again.
‘Hello, Mickey,’ she called blandly.
Mickey looked up, saw Kay, and laughed with pleasure. She laughed all the time, in an unforced, natural sort of way that people found awfully winning. Her voice was a throaty one, with a permanent cough in it. She smoked too much. ‘Hey!’ she said.
‘What’s the book?’
Mickey showed the cover. She read the books that people left in their cars, when they brought their cars to the garage to be fixed. This one was a paperback copy of Wells’s The Invisible Man. Kay took it, and smiled. ‘I read that,’ she said, ‘when I was young. Have you got to the bit where he makes the cat invisible, except for its eyes?’
‘Yes, isn’t it funny?’ Mickey was rubbing her greasy palm on her dungarees, so that she could take Kay’s hand. She was so small and slender, her hand was not much bigger than a child’s. She tilted her head, half-closed one eye. She looked like the Artful Dodger. She said, ‘I’d just about given up on you, I haven’t seen you in so long! How are you keeping?’
‘I thought it might be your lunch-break. Do you get a lunch-break? I brought you some buns.’
‘Buns!’ said Mickey, taking the bag and looking inside it. Her blue eyes widened. ‘Jam ones!’
‘With genuine saccharine.’
A car drew in. ‘Hang on,’ said Mickey. She put the buns down and went to speak to the driver and, after a second, began the business of filling up the car’s tank. Kay took her place in the canvas chair, lifting the book and opening it at random.
‘But you begin to realise now,’ said the Invisible Man, ‘the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter—no covering—to get clothing was to forgo all my advantage, to make of myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.’
‘I never thought of that,’ said Kemp.
Meanwhile, the pump had sprung into life and begun to throb and whine and click, and the smell of petrol, which had been faint before, grew heady. Kay put the book down and looked at Mickey. She was standing rather nonchalantly, one hand on the roof of the car, the other tense about the trigger of the petrol-gun, her eyes on the dial on the face of the machine. She was not quite handsome, but carried herself with a certain style; and it was extraordinary how many girls—even normal girls—could be intrigued and impressed by a pose like this.
&nbs
p; The driver of this car, however, was a man. Mickey tapped the last few drops of petrol from the gun, screwed on the cap of his tank, took his coupons, and came sauntering back to Kay, pulling a face.
‘No tip?’ said Kay.
‘He gave me threepence, and told me to buy a lipstick with it. His motor was rubbish, too. Wait here, will you? I’ll talk to Sandy.’
She disappeared into the garage. When she came back a few minutes later she had taken off her dungarees to reveal ordinary blue slacks and a funny little Aertex shirt, full of creases and stains. She had washed her face and combed her hair. ‘He’s given me forty-five minutes. Shall we go to the boat?’
‘Do we have time?’ asked Kay.
‘I think so.’
They went, as quickly as they could, down a couple of side-streets until they reached the Regent’s Canal. A hundred yards along the tow-path there was a line of house-boats and barges. Mickey had lived here since before the start of the war. It was quite a little village. There were warehouses and boatyards all about it, but the residents were artists and writers as well as real bargees—all rather self-consciously ‘interesting’ and ‘picturesque’, Kay sometimes thought them; all rather overpleased with the figures they knew they cut to the people who lived in ordinary flats and houses. Still, perhaps that was fair enough. Mickey’s boat—Irene—was a stubby little barge with a pointed prow, and always made Kay think of a clog. Its hull was tarred, and patched alarmingly. Every morning Mickey had to spend twenty minutes or more thrusting and drawing on the handle of a horrid little pump. Her WC was a bucket, set up behind a canvas screen. In winter the contents of the bucket could turn to ice.
But the interior of the boat was very charming. The walls were panelled with varnished wood, and Mickey had made shelves for ornaments and books. The lights were Tilly lamps, and candles in coloured shades. The galley kitchen was like a giant version of a child’s pencil-box, with secret drawers and sliding panels. The plates and cups were kept in their places with bars and straps. Everything was fastened as if against the swell of a high sea; in fact, the roll of the surface of the canal was quite gentle, and only disconcerting if you were unused to it or had forgotten what to expect.
Kay always stooped a little when she stood in Mickey’s boat. If she straightened, the top of her head just brushed the ceiling. Mickey herself moved about with perfect ease and comfort—sliding back some of the panels in the galley to bring out tea, a teapot, two enamel mugs. ‘I can’t boil the water,’ she said—the stove had gone out, and they hadn’t time to relight it—‘but I’ll get some from the girl next door.’
She went off with the teapot in her hand, and Kay sat down. The boat rocked, bumping hollowly against the bank, as a series of barges went by. She heard the voices of men, unnervingly clear: ‘—up Dalston way. I swear to God! Going up and down, like a ruddy great monkey on a—’
Mickey returned with the water, and set out tin plates. Kay picked up her bun, then put it down again. She took out her cigarettes instead—but paused, with the lighter in her hand. She gestured to the stains on Mickey’s shirt.
‘I suppose it’s all right to smoke around you? After all that prancing about, I mean, with the petrol-gun. You won’t go up in a whoosh of flame or anything?’
‘Not if you’re careful,’ said Mickey, laughing.
‘Well, thank goodness for that. For I should hate it, you know, if you did.’ She held the cigarettes out. ‘Care for a tickler?’
Mickey took one. Kay lit it for her, then lit her own. Behind her head was a sliding window: she pushed it open, to draw off the smoke.
‘How are things at Sandy’s?’ she asked, turning back.
Mickey shrugged. She was only at the garage, really, because it was one of the few places a woman could work and wear trousers. She had to have some sort of job: she didn’t, like Kay, have a wealthy family behind her, an income of her own. She’d begun to think, she told Kay now, of trying for a post as a chauffeur. She liked the idea of driving again, and of getting out of London.
They talked this over while they smoked. Mickey ate her bun, then opened the bag and ate another. Kay, however, left her own bun sitting in front of her, untasted; and Mickey said at last, ‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’
‘Why? Do you want it?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I’ve already eaten.’
‘I bet you have. I know your meals. Tea and tobacco.’
‘And gin, if I’m lucky!’
Mickey laughed again. The laugh became a cough. But, ‘Eat it up,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Go on. You’re still too thin.’
‘So what?’ said Kay. ‘Everybody’s thin, aren’t they? I’m in fashion, that’s all.’
Actually the greasy, saccharine look of the bun had made her start to feel almost queasy; but now, for Mickey’s sake, she picked the thing up and began to nibble at it. The sensation of the dough on her tongue and in her throat was horrible; but Mickey watched until she’d eaten it all.
‘All right now, matron?’
‘Not bad,’ said Mickey, narrowing her eye, looking like the Artful Dodger again. ‘Next time, I’ll buy you a dinner.’
‘You want to feed me up.’
‘Why not? We could make a night of it, get a bit of a crowd together.’
Kay pretended to shudder. ‘I’d be the skeleton at the feast. Besides’—she tossed her head like a debutante—‘I’m awfully busy these days. I go out all the time.’
‘You go to funny places.’
‘I go to the cinema,’ said Kay; ‘there’s nothing funny about that. Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way—people’s pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures. Or perhaps that’s just me…But you can get up to all sorts at the movies; you take my word for it. You can even—’
‘Even what?’
Kay hesitated. Even get up a woman, she’d been going to say, crudely; for one night recently at the cinema she’d got talking to a tipsy girl, and had finished by leading the girl into an empty lavatory and kissing her and feeling her up. The thing had been rather savagely done; she felt ashamed, thinking of it now. ‘Even nothing,’ she said flatly, at last. ‘Even nothing…Anyway, you could always come and visit me.’
‘At Mr Leonard’s?’ Mickey made a face. ‘He gives me the creeps.’
‘He’s all right. He’s a miracle worker. One of his patients told me. He cured her shingles. He could fix your chest.’
Mickey drew back, coughing again. ‘No fear!’
‘You dear butch thing,’ said Kay. ‘He wouldn’t actually have to look at it. You just sit in a chair and he whispers at you.’
‘He sounds bloody depraved. You’ve been there too long; you can’t tell how weird it is any more. And what about that house? When’s it going to fall down?’
‘It’s on its way,’ said Kay, ‘believe me. When the wind gets up, I can feel it swaying. I can feel it groaning. It’s like being at sea. I think it’s only thanks to Mr Leonard that it stays up at all. I think he keeps the place standing through sheer force of mind.’
Mickey smiled. But she was looking into Kay’s face, and her gaze had grown serious. And when her smile had faded she said, in a different sort of voice, ‘How much longer are you going to stay there, Kay?’
‘Till the day it collapses, I hope!’
‘I mean it,’ said Mickey. She hesitated, as if thinking something over. Then, ‘Listen,’ she said, leaning forward. ‘Why don’t you come and live here with me?’
‘Live here?’ said Kay, surprised. ‘On the Quaint Irene?’ She glanced around. ‘She’s not much bigger than a shoe-box. That’s all right for a little powder-monkey like you.’
‘Just for a while,’ said Mickey. ‘If I get that driving job, I’d be away on overnights.’
‘What about the rest of the time? Say you brought a girl back?’
&
nbsp; ‘We could work something out.’
‘Hang up a blanket? I might as well be back at boarding-school! Besides, I couldn’t leave Lavender Hill. You don’t know what it means to me. I’d miss Mr Leonard. I’d miss the little boy with his great big boot. I’d miss the Stanley Spencer couple! I’ve grown attached to the old place.’
‘I know you have,’ said Mickey. She said it in a way that meant: That’s what bothers me.
Kay looked away. She’d been talking lightly all this time, putting on an act, trying to hide the fact that, as before, real emotion was rising up in her, making her embarrassed and afraid. For here, she thought, was Mickey, on about a pound a week, ready to share it—just like that, at the drop of a hat, through simple kindness. And here was Kay herself, with money unspent, and with absolutely nothing wrong with her, living like a cripple, like a rat.
She moved forward and picked up her tea. She found, to her horror, that her hands were shaking. She didn’t want to put the mug back down and draw attention to the tremor; she lifted it higher, and tried to meet it with her mouth. But the tremor grew worse. Tea spilled; she saw it stain one of Mickey’s cushions. Abruptly, she set the mug down again and tried to mop up the worst of it with her handkerchief.
She caught Mickey’s eye as she was doing it; and her shoulders sank. She leant forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands.
‘Look at me, Mickey!’ she said. ‘Look at the creature I’ve become! Did we really do those things we did?—you and I, when the war was on? Sometimes I can’t bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings. We carried stretchers, for God’s sake! I remember lifting’—she spread her hands—‘I remember lifting the torso of a child…What the hell happened to me, Mickey?’
‘You know what happened,’ Mickey said softly.
Kay sat back and turned away, in disgust at herself. ‘It’s no more than happened to thousands of us. Who didn’t lose someone, or something? I could walk on any street in London, stretch out my arm, touch a woman or a man who lost a lover, a child, a friend. But I—I can’t get over it, Mickey. I can’t get over it.’ She laughed, unhappily. ‘Get over it. What a funny phrase that is! As if one’s grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one’s way over the rubble to the ground on the other side…I’ve got lost in my rubble, Mickey. I can’t seem to find my way across it. I don’t think I want to cross it, that’s the thing. The rubble has all my life in it still—’