by Sarah Waters
For a second she couldn’t go on. She looked around the cabin of the boat, then spoke more quietly.
‘Do you remember that night, when we all sat here? That night just before—? Sometimes I think about times like that. I bloody torture myself with thinking about times like that! Do you remember it?’
Mickey nodded. ‘I remember it.’
‘I’d been to that place in Bethnal Green. You made gin slings.’
‘Gin gimlets.’
Kay looked up. ‘Gin gimlets? Are you sure?’
Mickey nodded.
‘Weren’t there lemons?’
‘Lemons? Where the hell would we have got lemons? We had lime juice, remember, in a bottle of Binkie’s?’
Kay did remember it, now. The fact that she’d misremembered before—misremembered to the extent that she’d been able to picture Mickey actually cutting up the lemons, squeezing out the juice—made her uneasy.
‘Lime juice,’ she said, frowning, ‘in a bottle. Why should I have forgotten that?’
‘Don’t think about it, Kay.’
‘I don’t want to think about it! But I don’t want to forget it, either. Sometimes I can think of nothing else but things like that. My mind has hooks in it. Little hooks.’
But now she sounded almost crazy. She turned her head again, and looked out of the window. The sunlight made patterns on the water. A slick of oil had colours in silver and blue…She turned back into the cabin, and found Mickey checking her watch.
‘Kay,’ said Mickey. ‘I’m sorry, mate. I’ve got to get back to Sandy’s.’
‘Of course you have.’
‘Why don’t you stay here till I get home?’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m all right, really. It’s a bore, that’s all.’
She finished her tea. Her hand was quite steady now. She brushed crumbs from her lap, got to her feet, and helped clear away the plates.
‘What’ll you do now?’ Mickey asked her, as they made their way down the Harrow Road.
Kay became a debutante again. She made a flighty gesture. ‘Oh, I’ve heaps of things.’
‘Have you, really?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I don’t believe you. Have a think about what I said—about coming to live with me. Will you? Or come out, some time! We could go for a drink. We could go to Chelsea. There’s no one there these days, the crowd’s all changed.’
‘All right,’ said Kay.
She got out her cigarettes again, took one for herself, gave one to Mickey, and tucked another behind one of Mickey’s boyish little ears. Mickey caught hold of her hand when she had done it, and gave it a squeeze; they stood for a second, smiling into each other’s eyes.
They had kissed once, Kay remembered—years ago, and without success. They’d both been drunk. They’d ended up laughing. That’s what happened, of course, when you were both, as it were, on the same side.
Mickey moved away. ‘Ta-ta, Kay,’ she said. Kay watched her running back to the garage. She saw her turn, once, to wave. Kay raised her hand, then started to walk, back in the direction of Bayswater.
She walked briskly, for as long as she thought that Mickey might be watching; but as soon as she’d turned a corner, she slowed her step. And when she got to Westbourne Grove and the street grew busy, she found a doorstep in the shadow of a broken wall, and sat down. She thought of what she’d said to Mickey, about standing in a crowd, stretching out her hand. And she studied the faces of the people as they passed, thinking, What did you lose? How about you? How do you bear it? What do you do?
I knew that girl from Enfield was trouble the second she walked in,’ Viv was saying, as she sprinkled Vim on the cloth. ‘They always are, that brassy type.’
She and Helen had just been about to take their lunches out to the fire-escape when they’d spotted pencil-marks on the lavatory wall.
A long and thin goes right in
But a short and thick does the trick!
somebody had written, on the paint above the roller-towel. Helen had not, for a second, known where to look. Viv seemed hardly less embarrassed. ‘This is what comes,’ she said now, rubbing madly, ‘of advertising in those local magazines.’
She stepped back, flushed and blinking. The wall was pale where she had cleaned it, but the words thick and does the trick! still showed, scored faintly into the paint. She rubbed again, then she and Helen moved about, narrowing their eyes, holding their heads at different angles to the light. They became aware, all at once, of what they were doing. They looked at each other and started to laugh.
‘Dear me,’ said Helen, biting her lip.
Viv rinsed out the cloth and put away the Vim, her shoulders shaking. She dried her hands, then lifted her knuckles to her eyes, afraid for her mascara. ‘Don’t!’ she said.
Still laughing, they opened the window and clambered out. They sat and unwrapped their sandwiches, sipped their tea, and grew calmer at last, then caught each other’s gaze and started laughing all over again.
Viv set down her spilling cup. ‘Oh, what would the clients think?’
Her mascara had run after all. She got out a handkerchief, made a twist of it, put the twist to the tip of her tongue, then held up a mirror and widened her eyes, rubbing beneath them almost as savagely, Helen thought, as she’d rubbed at the marks on the lavatory wall. The blood, in rushing into her face, had made her seem youthful. Her hair was disarranged by laughter; she looked tousled, full of life.
She tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve and picked up her sandwich; and her laughter faded into sighs. She put back a corner of the bread, and the sight of the vivid meat inside it—and the taste of it, when she’d bitten—seemed for some reason to subdue her. Her face lost its flush. Her eyes dried. She chewed very slowly, and finally put the sandwich down. She was wearing a cardigan over her dress, and began fastening up its buttons.
It was almost two weeks since that warm Saturday, when Helen had lain with Julia in Regent’s Park. That had been the last warm day of the summer, though they hadn’t known it then. The season had turned. The sun was moving in and out of clouds. Viv put back her head to look at the sky.
‘Not quite so warm today,’ she said.
‘No, not quite,’ said Helen.
‘I suppose we’ll all be complaining, soon, about the cold.’
Helen saw winter, drawing nearer, like a long dark tunnel on a railway line. She said, ‘It won’t be so cold as last year, will it?’
‘I hope not.’
‘It won’t be, surely!’
Viv rubbed her arms. ‘A man in the Evening Standard said our winters will go on getting colder and colder, and longer and longer; that in another ten years we’ll all be living like Eskimos.’
‘Eskimos!’ said Helen, picturing fur hats and wide, friendly faces; quite fancying the idea.
‘That’s what he said. He said it was something to do with the angle of the earth—that we’d knocked it off-balance with all those bombs. It makes sense, if you think about it. He said it served us all right.’
‘Oh,’ said Helen, ‘people in newspapers are always writing things like that. Do you remember someone, at the start of the war, saying the whole thing was a punishment on us for letting our king abdicate?’
‘Yes!’ said Viv. ‘I always thought that was a bit hard on everyone in France and Norway and places like that. I mean, it wasn’t their king, after all.’
She turned her head. The door to the wig-maker’s downstairs had opened, and a man had come out into the yard with a waste-paper basket under his arm. The basket was filled to overflowing with dark fibres—a mixture, probably, of netting and hair. Viv and Helen watched him cross to a dustbin, lift its lid, and empty the mess of fibres into it. Then he wiped his hands, and went back in. He didn’t look up. When the door was closed, Viv made a face.
But Helen was still thinking about the war. She took another little bite of her sandwich, then said, ‘Isn’t it odd, how everyone talks about the war as if it
were a thing—oh, from years ago. It feels almost quaint. It’s as though we all got together in private and said to each other, “Now don’t, for God’s sake, let’s mention that!” When did that happen?’
Viv shrugged. ‘We all got tired of it, I suppose. We wanted to forget it.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I never would have thought we’d all forget it, though, so quickly. When it was on—Well, it was the only thing, wasn’t it? The only thing you talked about. The only thing that mattered. You tried to make other things matter, but it was always that, you always came back to that.’
‘Imagine if it started again,’ said Viv.
‘Christ!’ said Helen. ‘What an awful thought! It’d be an end to this place, anyway. Would you go back to your old job?’
Viv considered it. She had worked at the Ministry of Food, just around the corner in Portman Square. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe. It felt—important. I liked that. Even though all I was doing was typing, really…I had a good friend there, a girl called Betty; she was loads of fun. But she married a boy from Australia at the end of the war, and he took her back home. I envy her, now. If it really started again I might go into one of the services. I’d like to travel, get away.’ She looked wistful. Then, ‘How about you?’ she asked Helen. ‘Would you go back to your old job?’
‘I suppose so, though I was glad enough to leave it. It was funny work—a bit like this, in a way: unhappy people all expecting impossible things. You tried to do your best for them, but you got tired; or you had things of your own to think about. I don’t think I’d want to stay in London, though. London will get flattened, won’t it, when the next war comes? But then, everywhere will get flattened. It won’t be like last time. Even when things were so awful, right in the middle of the blitz, I wanted to stay—didn’t you? I hadn’t been here very long, yet I felt a sort of—a sort of loyalty to the city, I suppose. I didn’t want to let it down. It seems crazy, now! A loyalty to bricks and mortar! And then, of course, there were people I knew. I felt a loyalty to them, too. They were in London; and I wanted to be near them.’
‘People like Julia?’ asked Viv. ‘Were you friends with her, then? Was she in London, too?’
‘She was in London,’ said Helen, nodding; ‘but I only knew her at the end of the war. We shared a flat together, even then—a tiny little flat, in Mecklenburgh Square. I remember that flat so vividly! All the mismatched bits of furniture.’ She closed her eyes, recalling surfaces and scents. ‘It had boards across its window. It was falling down, really. There was a man upstairs, who used to pace and make the floor creak.’ She shook her head, opening her eyes. ‘I remember it clearer than anywhere else I ever lived; I don’t know why. We were only there for a year or so. For most of the war I was—’ She looked away again; picked up her sandwich. ‘Well, for most of it I was somewhere else.’
Viv waited. When Helen didn’t go on she said, ‘I lived in a boarding-house for Ministry girls. Down by the Strand.’
Helen looked up. ‘Did you? I didn’t know that. I thought you lived at home, with your father.’
‘I did at weekends. But during the week they liked to have us there, so we could get to work if the railways were hit. It was an awful place. So many girls! Everyone running up and down the stairs. Everyone pinching your lipstick and your stockings. Or someone would borrow your blouse or something, and when you got it back it was a different colour or a different shape, they’d dyed it or taken the sleeves off!’
She laughed. She moved her feet to a higher step on the metal ladder—drew up her knees, tucked in her skirt, rested her chin upon her fists. Then her laughter, as it had before, faded. Her gaze grew distant, serious. Here comes that curtain, Helen thought…But instead Viv said, ‘It’s funny, thinking back. It’s only a couple of years but, you’re right, it seems ages away. Some things were easier, then. There was a way of doing things, wasn’t there? Someone else had decided it for you, said that was the best way to do it; and that’s what you did. It got me down, at the time. I used to look forward to peace, to all the things I’d be able to do then. I don’t know what I thought those things would be. I don’t know what I thought would be different. You expect things to change, or people to change; but it’s silly, isn’t it? Because people and things don’t change. Not really. You just have to get used to them.’
Her expression, now, was so stripped, so solemn, Helen reached and touched her arm. ‘Viv,’ she said. ‘You look so awfully sad.’
Viv grew self-conscious again. She coloured, and laughed. ‘Oh, don’t mind me. I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself lately, that’s all.’
‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you happy?’
‘Happy?’ Viv blinked. ‘I don’t know. Is anybody happy? Really happy, I mean? People pretend they are.’
‘I don’t know, either,’ said Helen, after a moment. ‘Happiness is such a fragile sort of thing these days. It’s as though there’s only so much to go round.’
‘As if it’s on the ration.’
Helen smiled. ‘Yes, exactly! And so you know, when you’ve got some, that it’s going to run out soon; and that keeps you from enjoying it, you’re too busy wondering how you’re going to feel when it’s all gone. Or you start thinking about the person who’s had to go without so that you can have your portion.’
Her own mood sank, as she thought this. She began picking at blisters of paint on the metal platform, exposing fibres of rust beneath. She went on quietly, ‘Maybe it’s right, after all, what the newspaper prophets say: that one gets paid back in the way one deserves. Maybe we’ve all forfeited our right to happiness, by doing bad things, or by letting bad things happen.’
She looked at Viv. They’d never spoken to each other quite so freely before, and she realised, as if for the first time, just how fond she was of Viv, and how much she liked doing this—just this—sitting out here, talking, on this rusting metal platform. And she thought of something else. Were you friends with Julia then? Viv had asked lightly, before—as if it were the most natural thing in the world that Helen should have been; as if it were perfectly normal that Helen should have stayed in London, in a war, for a woman’s sake…
Her heart began to beat faster. She wanted, suddenly, to be able to confide in Viv. She wanted to, desperately! She wanted to say, Listen to me, Viv. I’m in love with Julia! It’s a marvellous thing, but terrible, too. Sometimes it makes a sort of child of me. Sometimes it feels like it’s almost killing me! It leaves me helpless. It makes me afraid! I can’t control it! Can that be right? Is it like this with other people? Has it ever been like this with you?
She felt her breath rising, until it seemed trapped in her chest. Her heart was beating wildly now, in her cheeks and fingertips. ‘Viv—’ she started.
But Viv had turned away. She’d put her hands to the pockets of her cardigan and, ‘Oh, heck,’ she said. ‘I’ve left my cigs inside. I’ll never get through the afternoon without one.’ She started to rise, seizing hold of the rail of the platform and making the whole thing rock. She said, ‘Will you give me a push up?’
Helen got to her feet more quickly. ‘I’m closer,’ she said. ‘I’ll get them.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, of course. It’ll only take a moment.’
Her breath still seemed to be crushed in her chest. She clambered awkwardly over the sill and landed with a thud beside the lavatory. There was still time, she thought, to say something. She wanted to more than ever now. And a cigarette would steady her nerves. She straightened her skirt. Viv called through the window: ‘They’re in my handbag!’
Helen nodded. She went quickly across the landing and up the short flight of stairs into the waiting-room. She kept her head down as she went, only glancing up at the last minute.
She found a man standing at Viv’s desk, looking idly over the papers.
She started so violently at the sight of him, she almost screamed. Startled himself, the man stepped back. Then he began to laugh. ‘Good L
ord! Am I so terrifying as that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen, her hand at her breast. ‘I had no idea—But the office is closed.’
‘Is it? The door downstairs was open.’
‘Well, it really oughtn’t to have been.’
‘I just walked in and up the stairs. I did wonder where everyone was. I’m sorry to have frightened you, Miss—?’
He looked frankly into her face as he said this. He was young and well spoken, handsome, fair-haired, quite at his ease—so unlike their usual run of client that she felt at a disadvantage with him. She was aware of herself, breathless and flushed, her hair uncombed. She pictured Viv, too, waiting out on the fire-escape…Balls, she thought. But there was still time.
She calmed herself down, and turned to the diary on Viv’s desk. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You don’t have an appointment, I suppose?’ She ran her finger down the page. ‘You’re not Mr Tiplady?’
‘Mr Tiplady!’ He smiled. ‘No, I’m rather glad to say I’m not.’
‘The fact is, we don’t see anyone without an appointment.’
‘So I see.’ He had turned when she had, and was looking at the page over her shoulder. ‘You’re certainly doing a roaring trade. That’s thanks to the war, I suppose.’ He folded his arms and stood more easily. ‘Just out of interest, how much do you charge?’
Helen glanced at the clock. Go away. Go away! But she was too polite to let the thought show. ‘We charge in the first instance,’ she said, ‘a guinea—’
‘As much as that?’ He looked surprised. ‘And, what will my guinea get me? I suppose you show me an album of girls, do you? Or, you don’t actually bring the girls in?’