by Sarah Waters
Julia watched her for a moment, then poured more tea from the bottle. She said, as if with a touch of sarcasm, ‘You are well adjusted.’
So then Helen grew embarrassed again. She thought, I’ve said too much, and bored her. She preferred me before, when I was quiet and she thought I was deep…
They sat without speaking, until Julia shivered and rubbed her arms. ‘God!’ she said. ‘This isn’t much fun for you, is it? Me, giving you the third degree, in the basement of a ruined house! It’s like lunch with the Gestapo!’
Helen laughed, her embarrassment fading. ‘No. It’s nice.’
‘Are you sure? I could—Well, I could show you over the whole place, if you like.’
‘Yes, I’d like that.’
They finished their sandwiches and their tea, and Julia tidied away the bottle and the paper and rinsed out the cups. They went back upstairs, going past the doors to the sitting-room and the room behind it, and up the dimly lit staircase to the floors above.
They went softly, sometimes murmuring together over some particular detail or piece of damage, but more often moving about in silence. The rooms on these higher floors were bleaker, even, than the ones downstairs. The bedrooms still had their beds and wardrobes in them, and the wardrobes were damp, because of the broken windows, the ancient clothes inside them eaten through by moths or growing mouldy. Sections of the ceilings had come down. Books and ornaments lay about, ruined. And in the bathroom, a mirror hung on the wall with a weird, blank face: its glass had shattered and fallen, and filled the basin beneath it with a hundred silvery shards.
As they climbed up to the attic floor there was a scuttling, fluttering sound. Julia turned. ‘Pigeons, or mice,’ she said softly. ‘You won’t mind?’
‘Not rats?’ asked Helen apprehensively.
‘Oh, no. At least, I don’t think so.’
She went on, and opened a door. The scuttling changed, became the sound of clapping hands. Peering over Julia’s shoulder, Helen saw a bird fly up and then, as if by magic, disappear. The sloping ceiling had a hole in it, where an incendiary had burned through. The bomb had landed on a feather mattress underneath and made a crater: it looked like an ulcerated leg. You could still smell the bitter scent of burnt, damp feathers.
The room was a housekeeper’s or maid’s. There was a photograph in a frame, on the bedside table, of a little girl. And on the floor was a single slim leather glove, much nibbled by mice.
Helen picked the glove up and did her best to smooth it out. She put it neatly down beside the photograph. She stood for a second looking up through the hole in the ceiling at the close, guncoloured sky. Then she went with Julia to the window, and gazed out at the yard at the back of the house.
The yard was ruined, like everything else: its paving-stones broken, its plants run wild, the column of a sundial blown from its base and lying in pieces.
‘Isn’t it sad?’ said Julia quietly. ‘Look at the fig tree.’
‘Yes. All that fruit!’ For the tree was lolling with broken branches, and the ground beneath it was thick with rotting figs that must have fallen from it and gone uncollected the summer before.
Helen got out cigarettes, and Julia moved closer to her, to take one. They smoked together, their shoulders just touching, the sleeve of Julia’s jacket just catching at Helen’s coat as she raised and lowered her cigarette. Her knuckles were still marked, Helen noticed, from where she’d grazed them the week before; and Helen thought of how, that time, she’d lightly touched them with her fingertips. She and Julia had only been standing together—just standing together, like this. Nothing had happened to make a change. But she couldn’t imagine, now, touching any part of Julia so carelessly as that.
The thought was thrilling, but also frightening. They chatted a little, about the houses that backed on to Bryanston Square; Julia pointed out the ones she had visited, and described the things she’d seen in them. But her sleeve still caught against Helen’s, and it was that brushing and clinging of fabric, rather than Julia’s words, that held Helen’s attention; at last she began to feel the flesh of her arm rising up—as if Julia, or the nearness of Julia, was somehow tugging, drawing at it…
She shivered and moved away. She’d almost finished her cigarette, and made that the excuse. She looked around for somewhere to stub it.
Julia saw. ‘Just drop it, and stamp on it,’ she said.
‘I don’t like to,’ said Helen.
‘It’ll hardly make things worse.’
‘I know, but—’
She took the cigarette to the fireplace, to crush it out there; and she did the same with Julia’s, when Julia had finished. But then she didn’t want to leave the two stubs behind in the empty grate: she waved them about to cool them down, and put them back, with the fresh ones, in her packet.
‘Suppose the people come back?’ she said, when Julia stared at her in disbelief. ‘They won’t like to think that strangers have been in here, looking at their things.’
‘You don’t think they’d be a shade more troubled by the rainwater, the broken windows, the bomb in the bed?’
‘Rain and bomb and windows are just things,’ said Helen. ‘They’re impersonal, not like people…You think I’m silly.’
Julia was gazing at her, shaking her head. ‘On the contrary,’ she said quietly. She was smiling, but sounded almost sad. ‘I was thinking—well, how awfully nice you are.’
They looked at each other for a moment, until Helen lowered her gaze. She put away the packet of cigarettes, then went back across the room to the charred mattress. The room seemed small to her, suddenly: she was very aware of herself and Julia in it, at the top of this chill, silent house—the warmth and the life and the solidness of them, in comparison with so much damage. She could feel the rising, again, of goose pimples, on her arms. She could feel the beating of her own heart, in her throat, her breast, her fingertips…
‘I ought,’ she said, without turning round, ‘to get back to work.’
And Julia laughed. ‘Now you’re nicer than ever,’ she said. But she still sounded sad, somehow. ‘Come on. Let’s go down.’
They went out to the landing and down one flight of stairs. They moved so quietly, still, that when a door was closed, somewhere at the bottom of the house, they heard it, and stopped. Helen’s heart, instead of rushing, seemed to falter. ‘What’s that?’ she whispered, nervously gripping the banister rail.
Julia was frowning. ‘I don’t know.’
But then a man called lightly up the stairs. ‘Julia? Are you there?’—and her expression cleared.
‘It’s my father,’ she said. She leant, and yelled cheerfully into the stairwell: ‘I’m up here, Daddy! Right at the top!—Come and meet him,’ she said, turning back, taking hold of Helen’s hand and squeezing her fingers.
She went quickly down the stairs. Helen followed more slowly. By the time she got down to the hall, Julia was brushing dust from her father’s shoulders and hair, and laughing. ‘Darling, you’re filthy!’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes! Look, Helen, what a state my father’s in. He’s been burrowing through coal cellars…Daddy, this is my friend Miss Helen Giniver. Don’t shake her hand! She thinks we’re a family of mudlarks as it is.’
Mr Standing smiled. He was wearing a dirty blue boiler suit with grubby medal ribbons on the breast. He’d taken off a crumpled-looking cap, and now smoothed down his hair where Julia had disarranged it. He said, ‘How do you do, Miss Giniver? I’m afraid Julia’s right about my hand. Been taking a look around, have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Rum sort of job, isn’t it? All dust. Not like the other war: that was all mud. Makes one wonder what the next one will be. Ashes, I expect…What I should really like to be doing, of course, is putting up new places, rather than grubbing around in these old ones. Still, it keeps me busy. Keeps Julia out of trouble, too.’ He winked. His eyes were dark, as Julia’s were, the lids rather heavy. His hair was grey, but darkened by dirt;
his brow and temples were dirty, too—or else freckled, it was hard to see. As he spoke he ran his gaze, in a practised, casual way, over Helen’s figure. ‘Glad to see you taking an interest, anyway. Care to stay, and help?’
Julia said, ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy. Helen has a terribly important job already. She works for the Assistance Board.’
‘The Assistance Board? Really?’ He looked at Helen properly. ‘With Lord Stanley?’
Helen said, ‘Only in the local office, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah. Pity. Stanley and I are old friends.’
He stood chatting with them for another few moments; then, ‘Jolly good,’ he said. ‘I’m off down to the basement, to take a quick look at those plans. If you’ll excuse me, Miss—?’
He stepped around them and headed downstairs. As he moved out of the thickest of the shadows Helen saw that what she’d taken to be dirt, or freckles, on his face, were really the scars of old blisters, from fire or gas.
‘Isn’t he a darling?’ said Julia, when he’d gone. ‘Really, he’s the most awful rogue.’ She opened the door, and she and Helen stood together on the step. She shivered again. ‘It looks like rain. You’ll have to be quick! You know your way back all right? I’d come with you, only—Oh, hang on.’
She’d put her hand, suddenly, on Helen’s shoulder, to keep her from moving on to the pavement, and Helen turned back to her, alarmed—thinking, almost, that Julia meant to kiss her, embrace her, something like that. But all she was doing was brushing dust from Helen’s arm.
‘There,’ she said, smiling. ‘Now, turn around and let me see the back of you. Yes, here’s another bit. Now, the other way. How biddable you are! But we mustn’t give Miss Chisholm any grounds for complaint.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Nor Kay, for that matter…There. That’s splendid.’
They said goodbye. ‘Come and find me some other lunchtime!’ Julia called, as Helen moved off. ‘I’ll be here for two more weeks. We could go to a pub. You can buy me that drink!’
Helen said she would.
She began to walk. Once the door was closed she looked at her wrist-watch, and started to run. She got back to her office at a minute past two. ‘Your first appointment’s waiting, Miss Giniver,’ Miss Chisholm told her, with a glance at the clock; so she didn’t have time, even, to visit the lavatory or comb her hair.
She worked very steadily, for an hour and a half. The job was tiring in times like these. The sort of people she’d been interviewing in the past few weeks were like the people she’d got used to seeing during the big blitz, three years before. Some of them came fresh from the wreckage of their homes, with dirty hands, cut about and bandaged. One woman had been bombed out, she said, three times; she sat on the other side of Helen’s desk and wept.
‘It’s not the house having gone,’ she said. ‘It’s the moving about. I feel like a bit of tinder, miss. I haven’t slept since all this happened. My little boy’s got delicate health. My husband’s in Burma; I’m all on my own.’
‘It’s awfully hard,’ said Helen. She gave the woman a form, and patiently showed her how to complete it. The woman looked at it, not understanding.
‘All this?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘But, if I could just have a pound or two—’
‘I can’t give you money, I’m afraid. You see, it’s a rather lengthy process. We must send a valuer to assess the damage before we can make an advance. We must have someone from our own department see your old home and make a report. I’ll try to get them to the site as quickly as I can, but with all the new raids…’
The woman was gazing, still, at the pieces of paper in her hand. ‘I feel like tinder,’ she said again, passing her hand across her eyes. ‘Just like tinder.’
Helen watched her for a second, then took the form back. She filled in the woman’s details herself, back-dating it all to the month before; and in the space requesting the date and serial number of the valuer’s report, she wrote some likely but vaguely illegible inky figures. She put the form in a tray marked Approved, ready to be sent up to Miss Steadman on the first floor; and she clipped on a note, to say it was urgent.
But she didn’t do anything like that for the next person, or for the people after him. She’d been struck by the woman’s describing herself as being like tinder, that was all. In the first blitz, she’d tried to help everyone; she’d given money to people, sometimes, from her own purse. But the war made you careless. You started off, she thought sadly, imagining you’d be a kind of heroine. You ended up thinking only of yourself.
For at the back of her mind, all afternoon, was the idea of Julia. She was thinking of Julia even as she was comforting the crying woman, even as she was saying, ‘It’s awfully hard.’ She was remembering the feel of Julia’s arm as it brushed against hers; the closeness of Julia, in that small attic room.
Then, at a quarter to four, her telephone rang.
‘Miss Giniver?’ said the girl on reception. ‘An outside call. A Miss Hepburn. Shall I put her through?’
Miss Hepburn? thought Helen, distractedly…Then she understood, and her stomach fluttered with anxiety and guilt. ‘Just a second,’ she said. ‘Ask the caller to hold, will you?’ She put the receiver down, and went to her door and called out: ‘Miss Chisholm? No more applicants, please, just for a minute! I’ve got the Camden Town office on the line.’ She sat back at her desk, and willed herself steady. ‘Hello, Miss Hepburn,’ she said quietly, when the call had been put through.
‘Hello, you.’ It was Kay. They had a sort of game, with names, like that. ‘This is just a nuisance call, I’m afraid.’ Her voice sounded deep, and rather lazy. She was smoking a cigarette: she moved the receiver, to blow out smoke…‘How’s life in Assistance?’
‘Pretty hectic, actually,’ said Helen, glancing at the door. ‘I can’t talk long.’
‘Can’t you? I oughtn’t to have rung, ought I?’
‘Not really.’
‘I’ve been kicking my heels at home. I—Just a minute.’
There was a little puff of air, and then a sense of deadness: Kay had put her palm over the receiver and started to cough. The cough went on. Helen pictured her as she’d often seen her—doubled over, her eyes watering, her face scarlet, her lungs filled up with smoke and brick-dust. She said, ‘Kay? Are you all right?’
‘Still here,’ said Kay, coming back. ‘It’s not so bad.’
‘You oughtn’t to be smoking.’
‘The smoking helps. Hearing your voice helps.’
Helen didn’t answer. She was thinking of the switchboard girl. A friend of Mickey’s had lost her job, when a girl had listened in on a private call between her and her lover.
‘I wish you were here, at home,’ Kay went on. ‘Can’t they get along without you?’
‘You know they can’t.’
‘You have to go, don’t you?’
‘I do, really.’
Kay was smiling: Helen could hear it in her voice. ‘All right. Nothing else to report, though? No one tried to storm the office? Mr Holmes still giving you the eye?’
‘No,’ said Helen, smiling too. Then her stomach fluttered again, and she drew in her breath. ‘Actually—’
‘Hang on,’ said Kay. She moved the receiver, and began to cough again. Helen heard her wiping her mouth. ‘I must let you go,’ she said, when she came back.
‘Yes,’ said Helen leadenly.
‘I’ll see you later. You’re coming straight home? Come quickly, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Good girl…Goodbye, Miss Giniver.’
‘Goodbye, Kay.’
Helen put the receiver down and sat very still. She had a clear image of Kay, getting up, finishing her cigarette, wandering restlessly around the flat, perhaps coughing again. She might stand at the window with her hands in her pockets. She might whistle or hum, old songs from the music hall, ‘Daisy, Daisy’, songs like that. She might put down paper on the sitting-room table, to polish her sh
oes. She might get out a funny little sailor’s sewing-kit she had, and darn her socks. She didn’t know that Helen, a few hours before, had been standing at a window, feeling the flesh on her arm rise up like the petals of a flower to the sun, because Julia was beside her. She didn’t know that Helen, in a little attic room, had had to turn away from Julia’s gaze, because the quickening of her own blood had made her afraid…
Helen snatched up the telephone again and gave the girl a number. The phone rang twice, and then, ‘Hello,’ said Kay, surprised by Helen’s voice. ‘What did you forget?’
‘Nothing,’ said Helen. ‘I—I wanted to hear you again, that’s all. What were you doing?’
‘I was in the bathroom,’ said Kay. ‘I’d just started to cut my hair. I’ve dropped hair everywhere, now. You’ll hate it.’
‘No I won’t. Kay, I just wanted to tell you—You know, that thing.’
She meant, I love you. Kay was silent for a second, and then said, ‘That thing.’ Her voice had thickened. ‘I wanted to tell you that, too…’
What an absolute idiot I’ve been! thought Helen, when she’d put the phone down again. Her heart felt, now, as though it were swollen inside her, was rising up, like dough, into her throat. She was almost trembling. She got out her handbag and looked for her cigarettes. She found the packet and opened it up.
Inside the packet were those two stubs. She’d put them in there and forgotten. There was lipstick on them, from her own mouth, and from Julia’s.
She put them in the ashtray on her desk. Then she found that the ashtray kept drawing her eye. In the end she took it from the room, and tipped it out into one of the wire bins in Miss Chisholm’s office.
At half-past six, Viv was in the cloakroom at Portman Court. She was standing in a lavatory cubicle, being sick into the bowl. She was sick three times, then straightened up and closed her eyes and, for a minute, felt wonderfully tranquil and well. But when she opened her eyes and saw the lumpy brown mess she’d brought up—a mixture of tea and half-digested Garibaldi biscuits—she retched again. The cloakroom door was opened just as she was coming out to rinse her mouth. It was one of the girls from her own department, a girl called Caroline Graham.