by Sarah Waters
‘What a pissing awful job,’ said Cole, as they climbed into the van.
They got back to the station at quarter-past four. The shift had changed by then: Mickey, Binkie, Hughes—everyone had gone. The new people, not knowing where they’d been, laughed at them. ‘What’s this, Langrish? Your own shift not enough for you that you have to do ours, too?’ ‘Yes, want to stay and take my place, Langrish? Cole, how about you?’
‘We’d make a better bloody show of it than you lot,’ said Kay, ‘that’s for certain!’
She joined Cole in the wash-room. They stood side by side in silence, cleaning their hands, not catching each other’s eye. When they’d put on their coats and started to walk together towards Westminster, Cole looked up at the sky.
‘Wasn’t it lucky that the rain held off?’ she said.
They went different ways at St James’s Park, and after that Kay walked more swiftly. Her flat was north of Oxford Street, in a sort of mews or yard off Rathbone Place. She had a route to it through the little streets of Soho—a fine, quick route, if you didn’t mind, as she didn’t, the loneliness of it at this time of night, and the eeriness of so many knocked-about houses and silent restaurants and shops. Tonight she saw nobody much at all except, close to home, her warden, Henry Varney.
‘All right, Henry?’ she called quietly.
He lifted his hand. ‘All right, Miss Langrish! I saw Jerry buzzing about over Pimlico, and thought of you. Keep you on your toes, did he?’
‘Just a bit. Anything doing round here?’
‘Very quiet.’
‘That’s what we want, isn’t it? Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Miss Langrish. Put your ear-plugs in just in case, though!’
‘I will!’
She went on, still quickly, to Rathbone Place; only at the mouth of the mews did she begin to step more lightly—for she had a secret, persistent dread of coming back and finding that the place had been hit, was in flames or ruins. But all was quiet. Her flat was at the blank far end of the yard, above a garage, beside a warehouse; she had to go up a flight of wooden steps to get to its door. At the top she paused, to take off her jacket and her boots; she let herself in with her latchkey and passed inside very softly. She made her way into the sitting-room and switched on a table-lamp, then tiptoed to the bedroom door and gently pushed it open. With the light of the lamp she could just make out the bed, and the sleeping figure in it—the flung-out arms, the tangled hair, the sole of a foot, thrust out from underneath the bedclothes.
She pushed the door further, went to the bed, and squatted beside it. Helen stirred, opening her eyes: not quite awake, but awake enough to put up her arms, be kissed.
‘Hello,’ she said, in a blurred kind of way.
‘Hello,’ murmured Kay.
‘What time is it?’
‘Horribly late—or horribly early, I don’t know which. Have you been here all this time? You didn’t go over to the shelter?’ Helen shook her head. ‘I wish you would.’
‘I don’t like it, Kay.’ She touched Kay’s face, checking for cuts. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Kay, ‘I’m fine. Go back to sleep now.’
She smoothed Helen’s hair away from her brow, watching for the stilling of her eyelids: feeling the rising of emotion in her own breast, and made almost afraid, for a moment, by the fierceness of it. For she thought of the little bits of bodies she and Cole had had to collect, tonight, from the garden on Sutherland Street, and felt the ghastliness of them, suddenly, as she had not felt it then—the awful softness of human flesh, the vulnerability of bone, the appalling slightness of necks and wrists and finger-joints…It seemed a sort of miracle to her that she should come back, from so much mayhem, to so much that was quick and warm and beautiful and unmarked.
She kept watch for another minute, until she was sure that Helen had sunk back into sleep; then she rose and tucked the bedclothes around her shoulders and lightly kissed her again. She shut the bedroom door as softly as she had opened it, and went back into the sitting-room. She pulled at her tie, undid her collar-stud. When she rubbed at her neck with her fingers, she felt grit.
Against one of the walls of the sitting-room was a little bookcase. Behind one of the books was a bottle of whisky. She got herself a tumbler and fished the bottle out. She lit a cigarette, and sat down.
She was fine, for a moment or two. But then the whisky began to shiver in the glass as she raised it to her mouth, and the cigarette to shed ash over her knuckles. She’d started to shake. Sometimes it happened. Soon she was shaking so hard she could barely keep the cigarette in her mouth or sip from her drink. It was like the passing through her of a ghost express-train; there was nothing to be done, she knew, but let the train rattle on, through all its boxes and cars…The whisky helped. At last she grew calm enough to finish her cigarette and sit more comfortably. When she was perfectly steady, and sure the express-train wouldn’t come back again, she’d go to bed. She mightn’t sleep, for an hour or more. Instead, she’d lie and listen to Helen’s steady breathing in the darkness. She might put her fingers to Helen’s wrist, and feel for the miraculous tick-tick-ticking of her pulse.
It was extraordinary how still the prison could get at this time of night; fantastic, to think of the number of men who lay in it—three hundred, in Duncan’s hall alone—so quietly and without fuss. And yet it was always at about this hour that Duncan woke: as if a certain point of stillness, when reached in the atmosphere of the place, acted on him like a sound or a vibration.
He was awake, now. He was lying on his bunk, on his back, with his hands behind his head; he was gazing into the blackness made by Fraser’s bunk, a yard above his face. He felt clear-headed and quite calm: relieved of an awful burden, now that visiting-day had come and gone—now that he’d managed to get through his father’s visit without arguing or sulking, without breaking down or making a fool of himself in some way. There was a whole month, now, until visiting-day came round again. And a month in prison was an age. A month in prison was like a street with a fog in it: you could see the things that were near to you clearly enough, but the rest was grey, blank, depthless.
He said to himself, How changed you are! For he’d used to brood over all the little details of his father’s visits, for days at a time; he’d lie tormented, seeing his father’s face, hearing his father’s voice and his own—like a mad projectionist with a picture, making it play over and over. Or else he’d compose wild letters, telling his father not to come again. One time he had thrown off the bedclothes, sprung from his bunk, sat down at his table, and actually, in the near-pitch darkness, started to write a letter to Viv. He had written feverishly, with a stub of pencil, on a sheet of paper torn from the back of a library book; and when he looked next morning at what he’d done it was like the work of a lunatic, the lines all running across each other, the same ideas and phrases coming up again and again: The filth of this place—I can’t describe it—I’m afraid, Viv—the filth—I’m afraid— He’d been put on report, then, for damaging the book.
He turned on to his side, not wanting to remember it.
The moon had set, but there must be starlight: he and Fraser had drawn back the black-out, and the window—a series of ugly little panes—cast an interesting shadow on the floor. You could see it move, Duncan had found, if you watched hard enough; or you could lie looking up, with your head at a tiring angle, and see the stars themselves, see the moon, the odd sparkle of gunfire. The lights made you shiver. The cell was cold. Low in the wall beneath the window was an opening in the bricks with a piece of Victorian fretwork across it: it was meant to circulate heat, but the air that rose from it was always freezing. Duncan was wearing his prison pyjamas, his vest, and his socks; the rest of his clothes—his shirt, his jacket and trousers and cape—he’d spread on top of the blankets that covered him, for extra warmth. In the bunk above, Fraser had done the same.
But Fraser had moved in his sleep, and his cape or his shirt was hanging
slightly to one side. He’d flung out his arm, too, and the fingers of his hand showed: shapely, dark, like the legs of some impossibly large and well-muscled spider. As Duncan watched, the fingers gave a twitch—as if feeling for a purchase, trying for a spring…Don’t look at it, Duncan said to himself, because he sometimes found that small, idiotic things like that could get a grip on his thoughts at night, and really unnerve him. He turned the other way, and that was better. If he stretched out his own hand now and touched the wall, he could feel where the plaster had been scratched away by men who’d lain here years before: J.B. December 1922, L.C.V. nine months ten days 1934…The dates were not old enough to be really quaint, but he liked to think of the men who had made them, and the little instruments they must have used, the stolen needles and nails, the broken bits of china. R.I.P. George K, a fine screwsman: that made him wonder if a prisoner had died in this cell, been killed, or killed himself. One man had scored a calendar, but he had given every month thirty days, so the calendar was next to useless. Another had written verses: Five lonely years I must walk my cell, I wish my wife was here as well—and underneath this someone else had put, She don’t you cunt, shes getting stuffed by your best pal ha ha.
Duncan closed his eyes. Who else, he wondered, was awake, in the whole of the building? Perhaps only the officers. You could hear them pass: back and forth they went, once every hour, like figures on an old-fashioned clock. Their shoes were soft, but made the metal landings ring: a chilly, shivering sound with a steady beat to it, like the pulsing of icy blood. You rarely heard it during the day, probably the place was too noisy then; to Duncan it seemed part of the special feel of the night, as if produced by the stillness and the dark. He would wait, to catch it. It meant another sixty minutes of prison time done, after all. And if he were the only man awake and knowing, then those sixty minutes, he felt, belonged exclusively to him: they went into his account, with a slither and a chink, like coins in the back of a china pig. Hard luck on the men who slept! They got nothing…But if someone stirred—if someone coughed, or banged on his door for an officer to come; if a man started weeping or calling out—then Duncan would share the minutes with him, fifty-fifty, thirty minutes each. That was only fair.
It was stupid, really, because of course, your time passed quickest of all when you were asleep; and lying awake, as Duncan was now, only made things worse. But you had to have little schemes, little tricks like this; you had to be able to turn your waiting into something more palpable—a piece of work or a puzzle. It was all you had to do. It was all that prison was: not a china pig after all, but a great, slow machine, for the grinding up of time. Your life went into it, and was crushed to a powder.
He lifted his head, then changed his pose again, rolled back on to his other side. The shivering sound had started up on the landing, and this time the beat was so slight, so subtle, he knew that it must be Mr Mundy who walked there; because Mr Mundy had been at the prison longer than any other officer and knew how to walk in a careful way, so as not to disturb the men. The beat came closer, but began to slow; like a fading heartbeat it came, until at last it stopped completely. Duncan held his breath. Beneath the door to his cell was a bar of sickly blue light, and in the vertical centre of the door, five feet from the floor, was a covered spy-hole. Now, as he watched, the bar of light was broken and the spy-hole, for a second, grew bright, then dimmed. Mr Mundy was standing, looking in. For, just as he knew how to walk so gently, so he also knew, he said, when any of his men were troubled and couldn’t sleep…
He stood there, quite still, for almost a minute. Then, ‘All right?’ he called, very softly.
Duncan didn’t answer at first. He was afraid that Fraser would wake. But finally, ‘All right!’ he whispered. And then, when Fraser didn’t stir, he added: ‘Goodnight!’
‘Goodnight!’ Mr Mundy answered.
Duncan closed his eyes. In time he heard the shivering beat start up again and grow faint. When he looked again, the bar of light beneath his door was unbroken, and the pale little circle of the spy-hole had been snuffed out. He rolled on to his other side, and put his hands beneath his cheek—like a boy in a picture-book, waiting patiently for sleep.
TWO
Helen!’ Helen heard somebody call, above the snarl of traffic on the Marylebone Road. ‘Helen! Over here!’
She turned her head, and saw a woman in a blue jeans jacket and dungarees, rather filthy at the knee, with her hair done up in a dusty turban. The woman was smiling, and had lifted her hand. ‘Helen!’ she called again, beginning to laugh.
‘Julia!’ said Helen, at last. She crossed the road. ‘I didn’t recognise you!’
‘I’m not surprised. I must look like a chimney-sweep, do I?’
‘Well, a little.’
Julia got up. She’d been sitting in the sun, on a stump of wall. She had a Gladys Mitchell novel in one hand and a cigarette in the other: now she took a hasty final draw on the cigarette and threw it away. She rubbed her hand across the bib of her dungarees, so that she could offer it to Helen. But when she glanced at her palm, she looked doubtful.
‘I think the dirt’s there permanently. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’
They shook hands. Julia said, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going back to work,’ answered Helen, a little self-consciously; for something about Julia—Julia’s manner, Julia’s clear, upper-class voice—always made her shy. ‘I’ve just had lunch. I work just over there, in the Town Hall.’
‘The Town Hall?’ Julia peered along the street. ‘We’ve probably passed one another before, then, and not noticed. My father and I’ve been working our way through all the streets around here. We’ve set up a sort of headquarters, in a house on Bryanston Square. We’ve been there for a week. He’s just gone off to see a warden, and I’m making it an excuse for a little sit-down.’
Julia’s father, Helen knew, was an architect. He was making a survey of bomb-damaged buildings, and Julia was helping. But Helen had always imagined them working miles away, in the East End or somewhere like that. She said, ‘Bryanston Square? How funny! I walk through there all the time.’
‘Do you?’ asked Julia.
They looked at each other, for a second, frowning and smiling. Then Julia went on, more briskly, ‘How are you, anyway?’
Helen shrugged, rather shy again. ‘I’m all right. A bit tired, of course; like everyone. How are you? Are you writing?’
‘Yes, a little.’
‘You manage to do it, in between bangs?’
‘Yes, in between bangs. It keeps my mind off them, I think. I’m just reading this’—she showed the book—‘as a way of checking out the competition. But tell me, how’s Kay?’
She asked it, perfectly easily, but Helen felt herself blush. She nodded. ‘Kay’s all right.’
‘Still at the Station? At Dolphin Square?’
‘Yes. Still there.’
‘With Mickey? And Binkie? They’re quite a pair, aren’t they?’
Helen laughed, agreeing that they were…The sun grew brighter, and Julia lifted the book to her brow, to make a shade. But she kept her gaze on Helen’s face as she did it, as if turning something over in her mind.
Then, ‘Look,’ she said. She tugged at her wrist-watch, which had worked its way around her arm. ‘My father will be ten minutes yet. I was just about to go and get myself a cup of tea. There’s a canteen thing up by the station. Care to join me? Or do you have to get back to work?’
‘Well,’ said Helen, surprised. ‘I ought to be back at my desk, as it happens.’
‘Ought you? But, look at it this way. The tea will make you work harder.’
‘Well, perhaps,’ said Helen.
She was still aware of having blushed; and she didn’t want Julia to suppose that she couldn’t stand in a street and talk about Kay, as if the whole thing weren’t perfectly natural, perfectly fine…And Kay herself would be pleased to hear they’d met up; she thought of it like that. So
she glanced at her own watch, then smiled and said, ‘All right, so long as we’re quick. I’ll brave the wrath of Miss Chisholm, just this once.’
‘Miss Chisholm?’
‘A colleague of mine, and frightfully proper. Her pursed lips are something awful…She scares the life out of me, to be honest.’
Julia laughed. They started to walk. They went very quickly up the street and joined a short line of people waiting to be served at the window of a mobile canteen.
The day, though sunny and almost breezeless, was cold. The winter so far had been a very bitter one. But that made the blueness of today’s sky, Helen thought, more lovely. Everyone looked cheerful, as if reminded of happier times. A soldier in khaki had leant his kitbag and rifle against the canteen van and was lazily rolling a cigarette. The girl in front of Helen and Julia was wearing sunglasses. The elderly man in front of her had on a cream Panama hat. But he and the girl had gas-mask boxes hung over their shoulders, too: people had dug them out, Helen had noticed, and started carrying them again. And fifty yards further along the Marylebone Road an office building had been freshly bombed: an emergency water tank had been set up; there were scraps of wet, charred paper clinging to the pavements, a coating of ash on walls and trees, and muddy tracks leading in and out of the wreckage where hoses had been dragged across the street.
The queue moved forward. Julia asked for teas from the girl behind the counter. Helen took out her purse, and there was the usual women’s quarrel over who should pay. In the end, Julia did; she said it was her idea in the first place. The tea looked ghastly, anyway: greyish, probably made from chlorinated water, and the milk was powdered and formed lumps. Julia picked up the cups and led Helen a little way off, to a heap of sandbags underneath a boarded window. The bags had had the sun on them; they smelt, not unpleasantly, of drying jute. Some had split, and showed pale earth, the limp remains of flowers and grass.
Julia pulled on a broken stalk. ‘“Nature triumphant over war,”’ she said, in a wireless voice; for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio—the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bomb-sites, the new species of bird, all of that—it had got terribly boring. She sipped her tea, then made a face: ‘God, this is awful.’ She got out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. ‘You won’t mind my smoking in the street?’