by Sarah Waters
‘Don’t what?’ asked Helen, as if amazed. But a part of her, too, was cringing from the words, utterly shamed by the monster she was making of herself. ‘Don’t what, Julia?’
‘Don’t start on all this—Christ! I’m not hanging around in here to listen to this.’ She pushed her way past Helen and went back into the kitchen.
Helen went after her. ‘You’re not hanging around, you mean, to let me catch you out in a lie. There’s a supper for you, but I don’t suppose you’ll need it. I suppose Ursula Waring took you to some chic restaurant. Full of BBC types, I expect. How jolly for you. I had to have dinner all on my own. I stood right here, at the bloody oven, and ate it with my apron on.’
The look of distaste reappeared on Julia’s face; but she laughed, too. She said, ‘Well, why for God’s sake did you do that?’
Helen didn’t know. It seemed absurd to her, now. If only she could laugh along with Julia. If only she could say, Oh Julia, what a fool I’m being! She felt like a person fallen overboard from a ship. She looked at Julia smoking her cigarette, putting the kettle on to boil: it was like seeing people doing ordinary things, strolling, sipping drinks, on the ship’s deck. There was still time, she thought, to put up her hand, to call out, Help! There was still time, and the ship would turn for her and she would be saved…
But she didn’t call, and in another moment there was no time at all; the ship had accelerated away and she was alone and helpless in a flat grey disc of sea. She started to thrash. She started to bluster. She spoke in a mad sort of hiss. It was all right for Julia, she said. Julia did just as she pleased. If Julia supposed Helen didn’t know what she got up to, behind Helen’s back, while Helen was at work—If Julia thought she could make a fool of her—Helen had known, from the moment she’d got home, that Julia was out with Ursula Waring! Did Julia imagine—? And so on. She’d pushed away that grubby, grinning jack-in-the-box, earlier on. Now it had sprung up again and its voice had become her own.
Julia, meanwhile, moved stonily around the kitchen, making tea. ‘No, Helen,’ she said, wearily, from time to time, ‘that’s not how it was,’ and, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Helen.’
‘When was it arranged, anyway?’ Helen asked now.
‘God! What?’
‘This tryst of yours, with Ursula Waring.’
‘Tryst! She called me up, some time this morning. Does it matter?’
‘Apparently it does matter, if you have to go creeping and sneaking about. If you have to lie to me—’
‘Well, what do you expect?’ cried Julia, losing her temper at last, putting down her cup so that the tea spilled. ‘It’s because I know you’ll behave like this! You twist everything so. You expect me to be guilty. It makes me appear to be guilty, even—Christ! Even to myself!’ She lowered her voice, mindful, even in her anger, of the couple downstairs. She went on, ‘If every time I meet some woman, make a friend—God! I got a call, the other day, from Daphne Rees. She asked me to have lunch with her—just an ordinary lunch!—and I said no, I was too busy; because I knew what you’d imagine. Phyllis Langdale wrote to me a month ago. No, you didn’t know that, did you? She said how nice it had been to meet us both, at Caroline’s supper-party. I thought of writing back and telling her what hell you’d given me over it in the taxi home! What a letter that would have made! “Dear Phyllis, I’d love to have drinks with you some time, but you see the thing is my girlfriend’s what they call a jealous type. If you were married, or extremely ugly, or some sort of cripple, I dare say things would be different. But a single, even vaguely attractive woman—my dear, I couldn’t risk it! Never mind if the girl’s not queer; apparently I’m so irrestistible that if she’s not a raving Lesbian when she sits down with me for a gin and French, she will be when she stands up again!”’
‘Shut up,’ said Helen. ‘You’re making me out to be a fool! I’m not a fool. I know what you’re like, how you are. I’ve seen you, with women—’
‘You think I’m interested in other women?’ Julia laughed. ‘Christ, if only!’
Helen looked at her. ‘What does that mean?’
Julia turned her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing, Helen. It always amazes me, that’s all, that it should be you who has this fucking—this fucking fixation. Is there something about affairs? Is it like—I don’t know—Catholicism? One only spots the other Romans when one’s practised it oneself?’
She met Helen’s gaze, and looked away again. They stood in silence for a moment. Then, ‘Work it up your arse,’ said Helen. She turned, and went back downstairs to the sitting-room.
She spoke quietly, and walked calmly; but the violence of her feelings appalled her. She couldn’t sit, she couldn’t be still. She drank the rest of her gin and water, and poured herself another glassful. She lit herself a cigarette—but put it out almost at once. She stood at the mantelpiece, trembling; she was afraid that, at any second, she might go shrieking and whirling about the house, pulling books from their shelves, ripping up cushions. She thought she could easily take hold of the hair on her own head and start tearing it out. If someone had handed her a knife, she would have jabbed it into herself.
After a minute she heard Julia going up to her study and closing its door. Then there was silence. What was she doing? What could she be doing, that she needed to close the door on it like that? She might be using the telephone…The more Helen thought about it, the more certain she began to feel that that was what Julia was doing. She was calling up Ursula Waring—calling her up to complain, to laugh, to make some fresh arrangement to meet…It was terrible, thought Helen, not to know! She couldn’t bear it. She went with diabolical stealth to the bottom of the stairs, and held her breath, trying to hear.
Then she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror: saw her flushed, contorted face; and felt filled with disgust. The disgust was worse than anything. She put up a hand to cover her eyes, and went back into the sitting-room. She didn’t think of going up to Julia. It seemed natural to her, now, that Julia should loathe her, should want to turn away from her; she loathed herself, she wished she could turn away from her own skin. She felt utterly trapped, suffocated. She stood for a moment not knowing what to do with herself, then went to the window and put back the curtain. She looked at the the street, the garden, the houses with their peeling stucco façades. She saw a world of devious things out to trick and mock her. A man and a woman walked by, hand in hand, smiling: it seemed to her that they must have a secret, to safety and ease and trust, that she had lost.
She sat, and switched off the lamp. Down in the basement the man, the woman, and their daughter called out, from room to room; the girl started playing a recorder, going over and over the same halting nursery tune. There was no sound from the rooms upstairs until, at ten o’clock or so, Julia’s door was opened and she went quietly down to the kitchen. Helen followed her movements with horrible distinctness: heard her pass back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom; saw her come down to use the lavatory, go to the bathroom, wash her face; saw her go up again to the bedroom, switching off the lights behind her as she went; heard her moving across the creaking bedroom floor as she took off her clothes and got into bed. She didn’t attempt to speak to Helen, or come to the sitting-room at all, and Helen didn’t call out. The bedroom door was pushed to, but not closed: the light from the reading-lamp showed in the stairwell for a quarter of an hour, and then was extinguished.
The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She only had to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place, but she couldn’t do it; she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn’t feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn’t feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes. Perhaps
Julia will come down and see me lying on the floor, she thought, as she lay there; she thought that if Julia did that, then she would at least realise the extremity of the feeling by which she, Helen, was gripped.
Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she’d lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She had often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. I won’t be doing it, she said to herself, like some hysterical girl. I won’t be doing it for Julia, hoping she’ll come and catch me at it. It won’t be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I’ll be doing it for myself, as a secret.
She didn’t allow herself to think what a very poor secret such a thing would be. She went quietly up to the kitchen and got her sponge-bag from the cupboard; came back down to the bathroom, softly closed and locked the door, and turned on the light; and at once felt better. The light was bright, like the lights you saw in hospital operating-rooms in films; the bare white surfaces of the bath and basin contributed, too, a certain clinical feeling, a sense of efficiency, even of duty. She was not in the least like some hysterical girl. She saw her face in the mirror again and the scarlet had faded from her cheek; she looked perfectly reasonable and calm.
She proceeded, now, as if she’d planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case that held the safety-razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal, and eased out the blade. How thin it was, how flexible! It was like holding nothing—a wafer, a counter in a game, a postage stamp. Her only concern was where she might cut. She looked at her arms; she thought perhaps the inside of the arm, where the flesh was softer and might be supposed to yield more easily. She considered her stomach, for a similar reason. She didn’t think of her wrists, ankles, or shins, or any hard part like that. Finally she settled on her inner thigh. She put up a foot to the cold rounded lip of the bath; found the pose too cramped; lengthened her stride and braced her foot against the farther wall. She drew back her skirt, wondered about tucking it into her knickers, thought of taking it off entirely. For, suppose she should bleed on it? She had no idea how much blood to expect.
Her thigh was pale, creamy-pale against the white of the bath-tub, and seemed huge beneath her hands. She’d never contemplated it in just this way before, and she was struck now by how perfectly featureless it was. If she were to see it in isolation, she’d hardly know it as a functioning piece of limb. She didn’t think she would even recognise it as hers.
She put a hand upon the leg, to stretch the flesh tight between her fingers and her thumb; she listened once, to be sure that there was no one out in the hall able to hear her; then she brought the edge of the blade to the skin and made a cut. The cut was shallow, but impossibly painful: she felt it, like stepping in icy water, as a hideous shock to the heart. She recoiled for a moment, then tried a second time. The sensation was the same. She literally gasped. Do it again, more swiftly! she said to herself; but the thinness and flexibility of the metal, which had seemed almost attractive before, now struck her, in relation to the springing fatness of her thigh, as repulsive. The slicing was too precise. The cuts she’d made were filling with blood; the blood rose slowly, however—as if grudgingly—and seemed to darken and congeal at once. The edges of flesh were already closing: she put the razor blade down and pulled them apart. That made the blood come a little faster. At last it spilled from the skin and grew smeary. She watched, for a minute; two or three times more worked the flesh around the cuts, to make the blood flow again; then she rubbed the leg clean, as best she could, with a dampened handkerchief.
She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.
She sat down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some almost chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed, alive, and chastened. She’d lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do; she would have hated, for example, for Julia, or any of their friends, to have come upon her as she was doing it. She would have died of embarrassment! And yet—She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way. You perfect fool, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.
Julia lay on her side, turned away from the door, her face in darkness, her hair very black against her pillow. It was impossible to say whether she was sleeping or awake.
‘Julia,’ said Helen, quietly.
‘What?’ asked Julia after a moment.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Do you hate me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t hate me as much as I hate myself.’
Julia rolled on to her back. ‘Do you say that as some sort of consolation?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Helen. She went closer, put her fingers to Julia’s hair.
Julia flinched. ‘Your hand’s freezing. Don’t touch me!’ She took Helen’s hand. ‘For God’s sake, why are you so cold? Where have you been?’
‘In the bathroom. Nowhere.’
‘Get into bed, can’t you?’
Helen moved away to take off her clothes, unpin her hair, draw on her nightdress. She did it all in a creeping, craven sort of way. Julia said again, when she’d got into the bed beside her, ‘You’re so cold!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen. She hadn’t noticed the chill, before; but now, feeling the warmth of Julia’s body, she began to shake. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. Her teeth chattered in her head. She tried to make herself rigid; the trembling grew worse.
‘God!’ said Julia; but she put her arm around Helen and drew her close. She was wearing a boy’s striped nightshirt: it smelt of sleep, of unmade beds, of unwashed hair—but pleasantly, deliciously. Helen lay against her and shut her eyes. She felt exhausted, emptied out. She thought of the evening that had passed, and it was astonishing to her that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.
Perhaps Julia thought the same. She lifted a hand and rubbed her face. ‘What a ridiculous night!’ she said.
‘Do you really hate me, Julia?’
‘Yes. No, I don’t suppose so.’
‘I can’t help myself,’ said Helen. ‘I don’t know myself, when I’m like that. It’s like—’
But she couldn’t explain it; she never could. It sounded childish, every time. She could never convey to Julia how utterly dreadful it was to have that seething, wizened little gnome-like thing spring up and consume you; how exhausting, to have to tuck it back into your breast when it was done; how frightening, to feel it there, living inside you, waiting its chance to spring again…
She said only, ‘I love you, Julia.’
And Julia answered: ‘Idiot. Go to sleep.’
They were silent after that. Julia lay tensely for a time, but soon her limbs began to slacken and her breaths to deepen and slow. Once, as if startled by a dream, she jumped, and that made Helen jump, too; but then she settled back into slumber. Out in the street, there were voices. Someone ran
laughing along the pavement. In the house next door a plug was drawn from an electric socket, a window went squealing against its frame and was closed with a bang.
Julia stirred in her sleep, made uneasy by dreams again. Who, wondered Helen, was she dreaming of? Not Ursula Waring, after all. But not of me, either, Helen thought. For, wakeful, chastened, she saw it all very plainly now: Julia’s staying out so late, when she might so easily have left a note; when she might so easily have done it differently, done it in secret, not done it at all…Don’t, Helen, Julia said, in exasperation, every time. But if she didn’t want bluster and fuss, why did she make it so easy for Helen to create them? With some part of herself, Helen thought, she must long for them. She must long for them because she knew that, beyond them, there was nothing: deadness, blankness, the arid surface of her own parched heart.
When did Julia stop loving me? Helen wondered now. It was too frightful a thought to pursue, however; and she was too exhausted. She lay open-eyed, still pressed close to Julia, still feeling the heat of her limbs, the rising and falling of her breath. But in time she changed her pose, and moved away.
And as her hand slid across the cotton of Julia’s nightshirt, she thought of something else—a silly thing—she thought of a pair of pyjamas she’d once owned, when the war was on, and then had lost. They were satin pyjamas, the colour of pearls: the most beautiful pyjamas, it seemed to her now, as she lay alone and untouched in the darkness at Julia’s side; the most beautiful pyjamas she’d ever seen.
Duncan had come home from work that night and heated a kettle full of water; he’d taken the kettle up to his room, stripped down to his vest, and washed his hands, his face, and his hair—trying to get the feel of the factory out of them, wanting to look his best for his evening with Fraser.
Still in his vest and trousers he’d gone downstairs, to polish his shoes, to put a towel on the kitchen counter and iron a shirt. The shirt had a soft collar to it, like the shirts that Fraser wore; and when Duncan put it on, still hot from the iron, he left it unbuttoned at the throat—just as Fraser wore his. He thought, too, of leaving the Brylcreem off his hair. He went back up to his bedroom and stood at his mirror, combing the hair this way and that, trying out different partings, different ways of letting it tumble over his brow…But the hair, as it dried, began to grow downy; he began to remind himself of the little boy in the ‘Bubbles’ advert for Pears soap. So he put the Brylcreem on after all, worrying that he’d left it too late, spending five or ten more minutes with the comb, trying to get the waves to sit right.