The Night Watch

by Sarah Waters

  Now, turning his head, he caught Duncan watching him; and smiled. ‘You don’t join in our discussion, Pearce?’ he called down the table. ‘What’s your opinion on all this?’

  ‘Pearce hasn’t got an opinion on anything,’ said Hammond, before Duncan could answer. ‘He just keeps his head down—don’t you, cock?’

  Duncan moved, self-conscious. ‘I don’t see the point of going on about things all the time, if that’s what you mean. We can’t change anything. Why should we try? It’s someone else’s war, not ours.’

  Hammond nodded. ‘It’s someone else’s fucking war, all right!’

  ‘Is it?’ Fraser asked Duncan.

  ‘It is,’ said Duncan, ‘when you’re in here. Just like everything else is someone else’s, too. Everything that counts, I mean: nice things, as well as bad—’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Giggs, yawning. ‘You sound like a right old lag, son. You sound like a fucking lifer!’

  ‘In other words,’ said Fraser, ‘you’re doing just what they want you to do. Garnish, and Daniels, I mean, and Churchill, and all the rest of them. You’re giving up your right to think! I don’t blame you, Pearce. It’s hard, in here, when there’s no encouragement to do anything else. When they don’t let you listen, even, to the news! As for this—’ He reached down the table. There was a newspaper lying there, the Daily Express. But when he opened it up, it was like one of those Christmas snowflakes made by children at school: pieces of news had been clipped out of it, and virtually all that was left were the family pages, the sporting pages, and cartoons. Fraser threw it down again. ‘That’s what they’ll do to your mind,’ he said, ‘if you let them. Don’t let them, Pearce!’

  He spoke very passionately, holding Duncan’s gaze with his clear blue eyes; and Duncan felt himself colour. ‘It’s easy for you—’ he started to say.

  But Fraser’s gaze had moved to a point behind Duncan’s shoulder, and his look had changed. He’d seen Mr Mundy, making his way between the tables. He lifted his hand.

  ‘Why, Mr Mundy, sir!’ he called, in a stagey kind of way. ‘You’re just the man!’

  Mr Mundy ambled over. He saw Duncan and gave him a nod. But he looked more warily at Fraser and said in his soft, pleasant voice, ‘Now, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ Fraser answered. ‘I just thought you might be able to explain to us why the prison system seems so keen on turning its inmates into morons, when it might—oh, I don’t know—educate them?’

  Mr Mundy smiled tolerantly, but would not be drawn. ‘There you are,’ he said, starting to move on. ‘You grumble all you like. Prison lets a man do that, anyway.’

  ‘But it won’t let him think, sir!’ pursued Fraser. ‘It won’t let him read the papers, or listen to the wireless. What’s the point of that?’

  ‘You know what the point is, son. It does you men no good to hear about things from the world outside that you’ve got no part in. It stirs you up.’

  ‘It gives us minds and opinions of our own, in other words, and makes us harder for you to manage.’

  Mr Mundy shook his head. ‘You got a grievance, son, you take it up with Mr Garnish. But if you’d been in the service as long as I have—’

  ‘How long have you been in the service, Mr Mundy?’ broke in Hammond. He and Giggs had been listening. The other men at the table were listening, too. Mr Mundy hesitated. Hammond went on, ‘Mr Daniels told us, sir, that you’d been here for forty years, something like that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Mundy, slowing his step, ‘I’ve been here twenty-seven years; and before that, I was at Parkhurst for ten.’

  Hammond whistled. Giggs said, ‘Christ! That’s more than murderers get, ain’t it? What was it like here in the old days, though? What were the men like, Mr Mundy?’

  They sounded like boys in a classroom, Duncan thought, trying to distract the master into talking about his time at Ypres; and Mr Mundy was too kind to walk away. Probably, too, he would rather talk to Hammond than to Fraser. He shifted his pose, to stand more comfortably. He folded his arms and thought it over.

  ‘The men, I should say,’ he said at last, ‘were about the same.’

  ‘About the same?’ said Hammond. ‘What, you mean there’ve been blokes like Wainwright, going on about the grub—and Watling and Fraser, boring everyone’s arse off about politics—for thirty-seven years? Blimey! I wonder you haven’t gone right off your chump, Mr Mundy. I wonder you haven’t gone clean round the twist!’

  ‘What about the twirls, sir?’ asked Giggs excitedly. ‘I bet they was cruel men, wasn’t they?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Mundy fairly, ‘there’s good officers and bad, kind and hard, everywhere you go. But prison habits—’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Prison habits were awfully hard in those days; yes, awfully hard. You fellows think you have it rough; but your days are like lambswool, compared to those. I’ve known officers would whip a man as soon as look at him. I’ve seen lads flogged—lads of eleven, twelve, thirteen, it’d break your heart. Yes, they were awfully brutal days…But, there it is. What I always say is, in prison you see men at their worst, and at their best. I’ve known plenty of gentlemen, in my time here. I’ve known fellows come in as villains and leave as saints, and the other way around. I’ve walked with men to the gallows, and been proud to shake their hands.’

  ‘That must have cheered them up no end, sir!’ called Fraser.

  Duncan looked at Mr Mundy and saw him flush, as if caught out. Hammond said quickly, ‘Who was the hardest man you ever had in here, sir? Who was the biggest villain?’ But Mr Mundy would not be drawn again. He unfolded his arms, straightened up.

  ‘All right,’ he said, as he moved off. ‘You men ought to get on and finish your dinners, now. Come on.’

  He started his circuit of the hall again, going slowly, and limping slightly, because of his hip.

  Giggs and Hammond snorted with laughter.

  ‘He’s a soft fucking git!’ said Hammond, when Mr Mundy was out of earshot. ‘He’s a fucking peach, isn’t he? I tell you what, though, he must be out of his fucking mind to have stood it in prison for—how long did he say? Thirty-seven years? Thirty-seven days was enough for me of this fucking place. Thirty-seven minutes. Thirty-seven seconds—’

  ‘Look!’ said Giggs. ‘Look at him go! What’s he walk like that for? He walks like a fucking old duck. Imagine if some bloke was to have it away over the wall while Mr Mundy was with him! Imagine Mr Mundy starting off after him!’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Duncan suddenly, ‘can’t you?’

  Hammond looked at him, amazed. ‘What’s it matter to you? We’re only having a bit of a laugh. Christ, if you can’t have a laugh in this place—’

  ‘Just leave him alone.’

  Giggs made a face. ‘Well, pardon us. We forgot you and him were so fucking thick.’

  ‘We’re not anything,’ said Duncan. ‘Just—’

  ‘Yes, give it a rest, can’t you?’ said another man, the embezzler. He’d been trying to read the cut-up Daily Express. He gave it a shake, and a bit of it fell out. ‘It’s like feeding time in the blasted zoo.’

  Giggs pushed back his chair and got up. ‘Come on, mate,’ he said to Hammond. ‘This table fucking stinks, anyhow.’

  They picked their plates up and moved off. After a moment the embezzler and another man went, too. The men left at Duncan’s end of the table shifted closer together. One of them had a little set of dominoes made from cast-off pieces of wood, and they began setting out the pieces for a game.

  Fraser stretched in his chair again. ‘Just another dinner-hour,’ he said, ‘at Wormwood Scrubs, D Hall.’ He looked at Duncan. ‘I never thought I’d see you take on Hammond and Giggs, Pearce. And all on Mr Mundy’s behalf! He’d be quite touched.’

  Duncan was trembling a little, as it happened. He hated arguments, confrontations; he always had. He said, ‘Hammond and Giggs get on my nerves. Mr Mundy’s all right. He’s better than Mr Garnish and the others, anybo
dy will tell you that.’

  But Fraser curled his lip. ‘Give me Garnish over Mundy, any day. Give me an honest sadist, I mean, rather than a hypocrite. All that bloody nonsense about shaking hands with the condemned man.’

  ‘He’s only doing a job, like everyone else.’

  ‘Like state-paid bullies and murderers everywhere!’

  ‘Mr Mundy’s not like that,’ said Duncan stubbornly.

  ‘He certainly,’ said Watling, glancing at Duncan but addressing Fraser, ‘has some very queer ideas about Christianity. Have you ever heard him talk on the subject?’

  ‘I think I have,’ said Fraser. ‘He’s one of the Mary Baker Eddy crowd, isn’t he?’

  ‘He said something to me once, when I was over at the infirmary with some very painful boils. He said the boils were simply manifesting—these were the very words he used, mind—they were manifesting my belief in pain. He said, “You believe in God, don’t you? Well then, God is perfect and He made a perfect world. So how can you have boils?” He said, “What the doctors call your boils is really only your false belief! Make your belief a true one, and your boils will disappear!”’

  Fraser gave a shout of laughter. ‘What poetry!’ he cried. ‘And what a comfort, to a man who’s just had his leg blown off, or his stomach bayoneted!’

  Duncan frowned. ‘You’re as bad as Hammond. Just because you don’t agree with it.’

  ‘What’s there to agree with?’ Fraser said. ‘You can’t agree, or disagree, with gibberish. And gibberish it is, most certainly. One of those things dreamed up to pacify sex-starved old women.’ He sniggered. ‘Like the WVS.’

  Watling looked prim. ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘He’s not so different, anyway, from you,’ said Duncan.

  Fraser was still smiling. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s like Watling said. You both think the world can be perfect, don’t you? But at least he’s doing something to make it perfect, by willing bad things away. Instead of just—Well, instead of just sitting in here, I mean.’

  Fraser’s smile faded. He looked at Duncan, then looked away. There was an awkward little silence. Then Watling moved forward again. ‘Let me ask you this, Fraser,’ he said, with an air of continuing a conversation in which Duncan had no part. ‘If at your tribunal they had told you…’

  Fraser folded his arms and listened, and gradually started smiling again—his good humour, apparently, quite restored.

  Duncan waited, then turned away. The men on the other side of him had just finished a game. Two of them were lightly clapping. ‘Well played,’ said one, politely. He and his neighbour passed over the tiny twists of tobacco they were using as wagers; then the three of them began to flip the dominoes over and mix them up, to start again. ‘Care to join us?’ they asked, seeing Duncan sitting more or less alone; but Duncan shook his head. He had the impression that he’d hurt Fraser’s feelings, and was sorry. He was going to wait another minute, to see if Fraser might give up the argument with Watling and turn back to him…

  But Fraser didn’t turn; and soon the stink of the blocked recess grew too much to bear. Duncan put his knife and fork together and, ‘See you later,’ he said to the domino players.

  ‘Yes, see you later, Pearce. Don’t—’

  Their words were interrupted by a cry: ‘Yoo hoo! Miss Tragedy! Yoo hoo!’

  It was Auntie Vi, and a couple of her friends—two boys a few years older than Duncan, called Monica and Stella. They were mincing down the hall between the tables, smoking, and waving their hands. They must have noticed Duncan getting to his feet. Now they called again: ‘Yoo hoo! What’s the matter, Miss Tragedy? Don’t you like us?’

  Duncan pushed in his chair. Fraser, he saw, had looked up as if irritated. Watling was making another prim, repressive sort of face. Auntie Vi, and Monica and Stella, minced closer. Duncan took up his plate and moved off with it just as they drew level with his table.

  ‘Off she trips, look!’ he heard Monica say, behind his back. ‘Where’s she going in such a hurry? Do you think she has a husband, up in that flowery of hers?’

  ‘Not her, my dears,’ said Auntie Vi, puffing on her roll-up. ‘Not while she’s still in black for the last one. Why, she’s sitting like Patience on a Monument, positively grinning at Grief! You know her story, don’t you? Haven’t you ever seen her in Mailbags One? Stitch, stitch, stitch she goes, with her little white hand; and at night, my dears, I swear she creeps back over there and pulls all the stitches out.’

  Their voices faded as they moved on. But Duncan felt himself blushing at their words, blushing horribly, guiltily, from his throat to his scalp. And, what was worse, he glanced back to his table and saw Fraser’s face; and Fraser’s expression was such an unpleasant one—such a mixture of awkwardness and anger and distaste—he grew almost sick.

  He scraped the uneaten food from his plate, then swilled the plate and his knife and fork in the tub of soapless cold water that was provided for them to wash their dinner-things in. He went across the hall to the staircase and began to climb it, as quickly as he could.

  He grew breathless almost at once. Any sort of exercise left him all winded. At the Threes he had to pause to catch his breath. At his own landing he leant on the rail outside his cell, waiting for his heart to slow. He folded his arms and rested on his elbows and looked back down into the hall.

  The din of quarrelling voices, of laughter and shouts, was milder up here. The view was horribly impressive. For the hall was as long as a small city street, with a roof of blacked-out glass. Strung right across it, at the level of the first landing, was a net: Duncan saw the men through a haze of wire and cigarette smoke and sickly, artificial light; it was like gazing at creatures in a cage or under water; they were like strange, pallid things that never saw daylight. And what you noticed most, he thought, from this height, was the drabness of it all: the concrete floor, the lustreless paint upon the walls, the shapeless grey uniforms with their single spots of red, the spew-coloured oilcloths on the tables…Only Fraser, it still seemed to him, stood out as a single point of brightness: for his cropped hair was fair, where most of the other men’s was dark or dull brown; and he moved animatedly, where others slouched; and when he laughed—as he did again now—he laughed with a shout that carried even to here.

  He was talking to Watling, still; he was listening hard to something Watling was saying, and occasionally nodding his head. He didn’t like Watling much, Duncan knew; but the fact was he’d talk to anyone, for hours at a time, just for the sake of it: it didn’t mean anything when he looked at you, spoke passionately to you; he was passionate about everything.

  ‘That boy Fraser oughtn’t to be here,’ Mr Mundy had said to Duncan, privately. ‘Coming from a family like that, with all the advantages he’s had!’ He took Fraser’s being here as a sort of insult to the other men. He said he was playing at being in prison. He didn’t like the fact that Duncan had to share a cell with him; he said that he’d end up giving Duncan ideas. If he could have found a way to do it, he would have got Duncan a cell all to himself.

  Perhaps Mr Mundy was right, Duncan thought, looking again at Fraser’s smooth fair head. Perhaps Fraser was only playing at being in prison—like a prince dressing up as a pauper. But then, what was the difference, in a place like this, between playing at something and doing it for real? It was like playing at being tortured, or being killed! It was like going into the army and saying you were only doing it for fun: the soldiers shooting at you from the other side wouldn’t know you were only pretending.

  Fraser stretched right back in his chair again, raising his arms, putting out his long legs. But he kept his back to Duncan; and Duncan suddenly found himself wishing that he would turn and look up. He stared at the back of Fraser’s head and tried to will him to turn around. He concentrated all his mind on it, sent out the words as a sort of ray. Look, Fraser! he thought. Look, Robert Fraser! He even used Fraser’s prison number. Look, 1755 Fraser! 1755 Robert
Fraser, look at me!

  But Fraser didn’t look. He kept on talking with Watling, and laughing; and at last Duncan gave it up. He blinked, and rubbed his eyes. And when he looked again, it was Mr Mundy’s gaze he met: for Mr Mundy must have spotted him leaning there, and been watching him. He gave Duncan a nod, and then moved on slowly between the tables. Duncan turned and went into his cell and lay down, exhausted.

  You’re late,’ said Viv’s friend Betty, as Viv ran down the stairs to the cloakroom at Portman Court.

  ‘I know,’ said Viv breathlessly. ‘Has Gibson noticed?’

  ‘She’s in with Mr Archer. They sent me all the way to the basement, for these.’ Betty held up files. ‘If you hurry you’ll be OK. Where’ve you been, anyway?’

  Viv shook her head, smiling. ‘Nowhere.’

  She ran on, pulling off her gloves and her hat as she went; throwing back the locker door when she got to it and bundling her coat inside. Miss Gibson let them keep their handbags at their desks, so she held on to that; but before she closed the locker door she quickly opened the handbag up and looked inside it, to be sure she had what she thought she might need—because her period was due, and her breasts and stomach were sore—a sanitary towel and a box of aspirin. She’d have liked to go to the lavatory and put the towel in place right now, but there wasn’t the time. She took an aspirin, anyway, as she started back up the stairs, chewing it up without any water and swallowing it down, making a face against the bitter chalky taste of it.

  She had been all the way back to John Adam House, in her lunch-hour; she’d gone back there to check the post. For she knew there’d be a card for her, from Reggie: he always sent her a note after one of their Saturdays; it was the only way he had of telling her he was all right. The card, this time, was a picture postcard with a daft illustration on it, a soldier and a pretty girl in the black-out, the soldier winking and the caption underneath saying, Keeping it dark. Next to this Reggie had written, Lucky ****ers!!! And on the back he’d put: G.G.—that meant Glamour Girl. Looked for brunette, but could only find blondes. Wish I was him & she was you! xxx. She had the card in her bag now, beside the box of aspirin.