by Sarah Waters
Viv said, ‘She wasn’t even a friend, really. We were strangers.’
‘Well, sometimes it’s easier to be kinder to strangers than to the people we’re closest to. She might have forgotten you, though—have you thought of that? Or she might not want to be reminded. Are you even sure it’s her?’
‘It’s her,’ said Viv. ‘I know it is. I just know. And yes, perhaps she has forgotten me, and perhaps I oughtn’t to bother her. It’s just—I can’t explain it. It just seems the right thing to do.’ She looked at him, suddenly afraid she’d said too much. She wanted to say: ‘You won’t tell Duncan?’ But what would that do, but make yet another secret?—a secret between him and her? You had to trust someone, after all; and perhaps he was right, and it was easiest to trust strangers…So she said nothing. She reached for one of the cakes and began to crumble it up. Then she turned her head, and gazed out into the street. She gazed idly, now, not looking for Kay; still sure, in her heart, that she’d had that single chance and lost it.
And even before her gaze had settled a figure came sauntering along the pavement from the direction of Waterloo Bridge: a slim, tall, quite striking figure, not at all like a boy or a middle-aged man, with its hands in its trouser pockets and a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from its lip…Viv moved closer to the window. Fraser saw, and leant to look, too.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘You haven’t seen her? Which one are you looking at? Not the tailored type, with the swagger?’
‘Don’t!’ said Viv, moving back, reaching across the table to pull him back with her. ‘She’ll see.’
‘I thought that was the point! What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you going to go over?’
She’d lost her nerve. ‘I don’t know. Shall I?’
‘After you’ve put me through all this?’
‘It’s so long ago. She’ll think I’m crackers.’
‘But you want to, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go on, then! What are you waiting for?’
Again, it was the youth and the excitement in his blue eyes that made her do it. She got to her feet, and went out of the café; she ran across the street and reached Kay’s side just as Kay herself had reached the cinema’s swing doors. She took out the ring, in its cloth, from her pocket; and just touched Kay’s arm…
It only took a minute or two. It was the easiest thing she’d ever done. But she came back to the café feeling elated. She sat, and smiled and smiled. Fraser watched her, smiling too.
‘Did she remember you?’
Viv nodded.
‘Was she pleased to see you?’
‘I’m not sure. She seemed—different. I suppose everyone’s different from how they were in those days.’
‘Will you see her again? Are you glad you did it?’
‘Yes,’ said Viv. Then she said it again. ‘Yes, I’m glad I did it.’
She looked back over at the cinema. There was no sign of Kay now. But her feeling of elation persisted. She felt capable of anything! She finished her coffee, her mind racing. She was thinking of all the things she could do. She could give up her job! She could leave Streatham, take a little flat all to herself! She could call up Reggie! Her heart jumped. She could find a telephone box, right now. She could call him up and tell him—what? That she was through with him, for ever! That she forgave him; but that forgiving wasn’t enough…The possibilities made her giddy. Maybe she’d never do any of these things. But oh, how marvellous it was, just to know that she could!
She put down her cup and started to laugh. Fraser laughed, too. His smile had a frown mixed up in it; and as he looked her over, he shook his head.
‘How extraordinarily like your brother you are!’ he said.
The house, when Helen got home that night, was empty. She stood in the hall, calling Julia’s name; but became aware, even as she was calling, of a sort of deadness to the place. The lights were off; the stove and kettle, up in the kitchen, were quite cold. Her first, wild, idiotic thought was, Julia’s gone; and she went with a feeling of dread into their bedroom and slowly drew back the wardrobe door, certain that Julia’s clothes would have all been cleared away…She did this before she’d taken her own coat off, and when she saw that Julia’s clothes were still there; that none of her suitcases was missing; that her hairbrush and jewellery and cosmetics were all still scattered on top of the dressing-table, she sat awkwardly down on the bed and shook with relief.
You bloody idiot, she said to herself, almost laughing.
But then, where was Julia? Helen went back to the wardrobe. After a little calculation she worked out that Julia had gone out in one of her smartish dresses and one of her nicer coats. She’d taken her decent-looking bag, as opposed to her scuffed one. She might have gone to visit her parents, Helen thought. She might be out with her literary agent or her publisher. She might be with Ursula Waring, said a gnomish voice, from a dark, grubby corner of Helen’s mind; but Helen wouldn’t listen to that. Julia would be out with her editor or agent; probably her agent had rung up at the last minute, as he often did, and asked her to run into the office and sign some paper—something like that.
If that were the case, of course, Julia would have left a note. Helen got up and took her coat off—quite calm, now—and began to look around the house. She went back to the kitchen. Beside the pantry, hanging up from a nail, they kept a hinged brass hand with scraps of paper clasped in it, for writing lists and messages on; but all the messages gripped in it now were old ones. She searched the floor, in case a scrap of paper had fallen out. She looked on the kitchen counters and shelves and, finding nothing, began to look in all sorts of other, improbable places: in the bathroom, under the cushions on the sofa, in the pockets of one of Julia’s cardigans. At last she could feel her searching taking on an edge of panic or compulsion. Again that grubby voice rose inside her, just pointed out to her that here she was, picking her way through bits of dust like an imbecile, when all the time Julia was out with Ursula Waring or some other woman, laughing at the very thought of her—
She had to thrust this voice back down. It was like pressing down the spring of a grinning jack-in-the-box. But she wouldn’t give in to thoughts like that. It was seven o’clock, an ordinary evening, and she was hungry. Everything was perfectly all right. Julia had gone out without expecting to be so late. Julia had been delayed, that was all. People got delayed, for God’s sake, all the time! She decided to start cooking their dinner. She gathered together the ingredients for a shepherd’s pie. She said to herself that by the time the pie had gone into the oven, Julia would be home.
She put the wireless on as she cooked, but kept the volume very low; and all the time that she boiled water, fried the mince, mashed the potato, she stood quite tensely, listening out for the sound of Julia’s key being put into the lock of the door downstairs.
When the dish was ready, she didn’t know whether to keep on waiting for Julia or not. She served it up on two plates; she put the plates to keep warm in the oven, and slowly did all the washing-up and the drying. Surely by the time she’d finished that, Julia would be back, and they could sit down and eat together? By now she was starving. When the washing-up was done she got her plate back out, put it to rest on top of the stove, and began to pick at the potato with a fork. She only meant to eat a morsel or two, just to blunt her hunger; she ended up eating the whole thing—eating it like that, standing up, with her pinnie on, with the steam running down the kitchen window, and the man and the woman, out in the yard, starting up a fresh argument, or a new version of an old one.
‘Work it up your arse!’
She’d been so long in the bright kitchen, when she went out into the rest of the house she found it gloomy. She moved swiftly from room to room, turning on lights. She went down to the sitting-room and poured herself a glass of gin and water. She sat on the sofa and got out her knitting; she knitted for five or ten minutes. But the wool seemed to catch at her dry fingers. The gin was souring her mood, making
her clumsy, unsettling her. She threw the knitting down and got to her feet. She wandered back up to the kitchen, still looking, vaguely, for some sort of note. She reached the bottom of the narrow staircase leading up to Julia’s study. The urge came over her to go up there.
There was no reason, she thought, as she climbed the stairs, for feeling self-conscious about it. Julia had never said, for example, that she would prefer it if Helen left her study alone. The subject had never arisen between them; on the contrary, there were times when Julia had gone out to some meeting or other and had telephoned to say, ‘I’m sorry, Helen, I’ve been an idiot and left a paper behind. Would you mind running up to my room and fishing it out?’ That showed she didn’t mind the thought of Helen going through the drawers of her desk; and certainly, though the drawers had keys to them, the keys were never turned.
Still, there was something furtive, something troubling, about visiting Julia’s study when Julia wasn’t there. It was like going alone to your parents’ bedroom when you were a child: you suspected that things went on there—precise, unguessable things, that were both about you and yet excluded you utterly…So Helen felt, anyway. She’d feel this even while, as now, she was simply standing in the room—not lifting up papers or peering gingerly into unsealed envelopes, just standing still in the middle of the room and looking around.
The room took up almost all of the attic floor. It was dim, quiet, with sloping ceilings—a real writer’s garret, she and Julia liked to joke. The walls were a pale shade of olive; the carpet was a genuine Turkey rug, only slightly worn. A desk like a bank-manager’s, and a swivel chair, were in front of one of the windows; an aged leather sofa was in front of the other—for Julia wrote in bursts, and in between liked to doze or read. A table at the sofa’s end held dirty cups and glasses, a saucer of biscuit crumbs, an ashtray, ash. The cups and stubs of cigarettes had Julia’s lipstick on them. A tumbler had a smudge left by her thumb. Everywhere, in fact, there were bits of Julia—Julia’s dark hairs on the sofa cushions and the floor; her kicked-off espadrilles beneath the desk; a clipping of nail beside the waste-paper basket, an eyelash, powder from her cheek.
If I were to hear, Helen said to herself, that Julia had died today, I’d come in here, in exactly this way, and all this rubbish would be the stuff of tragedy. As it was, she gazed from thing to thing and felt the chafing within her of a familiar but uneasy mix of emotions: fondness, annoyance, and fear. She thought of the haphazard way in which Julia had used to write, in that studio flat in Mecklenburgh Square she’d been describing to Viv, today, on the fire-escape. She remembered lying on a divan bed while Julia worked at a rickety table by the light of a single candle—her hand, as it rested on the page, seeming to cradle the flame, her palm a mirror, her handsome face lit up…She would come to bed at last, after writing for hours like that, and lie tired out but sleepless, distracted and remote; Helen would sometimes softly lay a hand on her forehead and seem to be able to feel the words jostling and buzzing about behind it like so many bees. She didn’t mind. She almost liked it. Because the novel after all was only a novel; the people in it weren’t real; it was she, Helen, who was real, she who was able to lie at Julia’s side like that and touch her brow…
She moved closer to Julia’s desk. It was, like everything of Julia’s, untidy, the blotting-paper over-inked, a pot of treasury-tags upturned, a heap of papers mixed with dirty handkerchiefs and envelopes, dried apple peel and tape. In the middle of it all was one of Julia’s cheap blue Century notebooks. Sicken 2, she had put on its cover: it held her plans for the novel she was working on now, a novel set in a nursing-home and called Sicken and So Die. Helen had come up with that title. She knew all the ins and outs of the complicated plot. She opened the book and looked inside it, and the apparently cryptic jottings—Inspector B to Maidstone—check RT, and Nurse Pringle—syrup, not needle!!—made perfect sense to her. There was nothing here that she didn’t understand. It was all as ordinary and as familiar to her as her own lopsided face.
Why, then, did Julia seem to recede from her, the closer she drew to objects like this? And where the hell was Julia now? She opened the notebook again and began to look more desperately through its pages, as if searching for clues. She picked up an inky handkerchief and shook it out. She looked beneath the blotting-pad. She opened drawers. She lifted a paper, an envelope, a book—
Underneath the book was the Radio Times from a fortnight before, folded open at the article about Julia.
URSULA WARING introduces Julia Standing’s thrilling new novel—
And there, of course, was the little photograph. Julia had gone to a Mayfair man to have it done, and Helen had gone with her, ‘for the fun of it’. The afternoon had been no fun at all. Helen had felt like a dowdy schoolgirl accompanying a good-looking friend to the hairdresser’s—holding Julia’s bag while the man made her pose and move about; having to watch while he smartened her hair, tilted her jaw, took her hands in his, the better to place them. The finished pictures were flattering, though Julia pretended not to like them; they made her look glamorous—but not glamorous, Helen thought, in the way she really, effortlessly was—as she lounged about the flat, say, in her unironed trousers and patched shirts. They made her look marriageable; Helen didn’t know if there was any better term. And she had thought, in great dismay, of all the ordinary people who must have picked up the Radio Times and opened it at Julia’s face and said to themselves, idly and admiringly, What a handsome woman! She’d pictured them as so many grubby fingers, rubbing down the image on a coin; or as quarrelling birds, pecking at Julia, taking her away, crumb by crumb…
She had been secretly glad when that issue had gone out of date and been replaced by another. Now, however, she looked at the magazine—at Julia’s picture, at Ursula Waring’s name—and all the old anxiety rose up in her as if fresh. She got into a squat, and closed her eyes, and bowed her head until her brow met the edge of Julia’s desk; she moved her face so that the edge ground into her and hurt her. I’d suffer more pain than this, she thought as she did it, to be sure of Julia! She thought of the things she’d readily give up—the tip of a finger, a toe, a day from the end of her life. She thought there ought to be a system—a sort of medieval system—whereby people could earn the things they passionately wanted by being flogged or branded or cut. She almost wished that Julia had failed. She thought the words: I wish she’d failed! What a little shit she must be! How the hell had she got to this place? This place where she wished things like that on Julia? But it’s only, she said wretchedly to herself, because I love her—
As she said the words, she heard the rattling of Julia’s key in the lock of their front door. She scrambled to her feet, switched off the light, and dashed downstairs; she went into the kitchen and pretended to be doing something at the sink, turning on the tap, filling a glass with water and emptying it out again. She didn’t look round. She was thinking, Don’t make a fuss. Everything’s all right. Be perfectly natural. Be quite calm.
Then Julia came to her, and kissed her; and she smelt wine and cigarette smoke on Julia’s mouth, and saw the bright, flushed, pleased expression on her face. And then her heart—for all that she was trying so desperately to hold back its jaws—her heart shut tight inside her, like a trap.
Julia said, ‘Darling! I’m so sorry.’
Helen spoke coldly. ‘What are you sorry for?’
‘It’s so late! I meant to be back hours ago. I had no idea.’
‘Where have you been?’
Julia turned away. She said lightly, ‘I’ve been with Ursula, that’s all. She invited me over for afternoon tea. Somehow, you know how it is, the tea turned into supper—’
‘Afternoon tea?’
‘Yes,’ said Julia. She was heading back into the hall, taking off her coat and hat.
‘That’s not like you, to cut into your working day like that.’
‘Well, I’d got heaps done earlier on. I worked like a demon, from nine until four! When Ursula rang
, I thought—’
‘I called you at ten to two. Were you working then?’
Julia didn’t answer for a moment. She said at last, from out in the hall, ‘Ten to two? How very precise. I suppose I must have been.’
‘You don’t remember the phone ringing?’
‘Probably I was downstairs.’
Helen went out to her. ‘You heard Ursula Waring’s ring, though.’
Julia was tidying her hair at the hall mirror. She said, as if patiently, ‘Helen, don’t do this.’ She turned and looked, frowning, into Helen’s face. ‘What’s the matter with your forehead? It’s all red. Look, here.’
She came to Helen, her hand outstretched. Helen hit the hand away. ‘I had no idea where the hell you were! Couldn’t you have left me a note, even?’
‘I didn’t think to leave a note. One doesn’t suppose, when one goes out to lunch—’
Helen pounced. ‘To lunch? Not afternoon tea, then, after all?’
Julia’s flushed cheeks grew pinker. She put down her head and moved past Helen into the bedroom. ‘I just said lunch as an example. For God’s sake!’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Helen, following her in. ‘I think you’ve been out with Ursula Waring all day.’ No reply. ‘Well, have you?’
Julia had gone to the dressing-table and was getting herself a cigarette. Catching Helen’s bullying tone, she paused with the cigarette at her lips, and narrowed her eyes, and shook her head, as if in distaste and disbelief. She said, ‘Did this sort of thing seem flattering, once? Did it, ever?’ She turned, struck a match, and coolly lit the cigarette. When she turned back, her face had changed, become set, as if carved from coloured marble or a length of blemishless wood. She took the cigarette from her mouth and said, in a level, warning tone: ‘Don’t, Helen.’