by Sarah Waters
‘Wait here, while I get rid of this lot,’ she said, going back out through the curtain with the jacket and the shoes.
Helen stood, nervously, helplessly, and gazed about.
The room was large, warm, untidy, not at all like Kay’s neat bachelor flat; but not quite, either, what Helen had been expecting. The walls were bare, and coloured with a patchy red distemper; the carpets were an assortment of overlapping Turkish kilims and imitation rugs. The furniture was very ordinary. There was one large divan couch, covered with mismatched cushions; and a dirty pink velvet chair, with springs and strips of torn hessian showing beneath. The mantelpiece was painted marble. It had an ashtray on it, overflowing with stubs. One of these still smoked: Julia came back, and picked it up and pinched it out.
Helen said, ‘You don’t mind, do you, that I’ve come?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I started to walk. Then I saw where I was. I remembered your house.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. I came here once, ages ago. With Kay. Do you remember? Kay was dropping something off to you—a ticket, or a book, something like that. We didn’t come up, you said the place was too untidy. We stood about in the hall, downstairs…Do you remember?’
Julia frowned. Then, ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I think I do.’
They looked at each other, and almost at once looked away, as if in embarrassment or perplexity—for it was impossible, Helen found, to imagine a time when calling on Julia with Kay would have been an ordinary thing to do; impossible to think of standing at Kay’s side on a doorstep, chatting politely, thinking only how mildly awkward things were, between Julia and Kay. And again she thought, what had happened, since then? Nothing had happened, really.
But if nothing has happened, she asked herself, why have I kept that nothing from Kay? Why the hell am I here?
She knew why she was there. She grew afraid.
‘Perhaps I should go,’ she said, ‘after all.’
‘You’ve only just arrived!’
‘You’ve been washing your hair.’
Julia frowned, as if annoyed. ‘You’ve seen wet hair before, haven’t you? Don’t be idiotic. Sit down, and I’ll get you a drink. I have wine! I’ve had it for weeks, and had no occasion for opening it. It’s only Algerian, but still.’
She stooped to open a cupboard and started shifting things about inside it. Helen watched her for a second, then took a step and, nervously, looked around again. She went to a shelf of books and glanced across the titles. They were detective stories, mainly, with gaudy spines. Julia’s two published novels sat amongst them: Death by Degrees and Twenty Mortal Murders.
She looked from the books to the pictures on the walls, the ornaments on the painted mantelpiece. As awkward and as anxious as she was, she wanted to absorb every little detail, for the sake of what that detail might be able to tell her about Julia.
‘Your flat’s charming,’ she said, conventionally.
‘You think so?’ Julia closed the cupboard door and straightened up. She had a bottle, a corkscrew, glasses. ‘It’s mostly my cousin Olga’s stuff, not mine.’
‘Your cousin Olga’s?’
‘The flat’s my aunt’s. I’m living here to keep it from being requisitioned. One of those genteel dodges at which the upper-middle classes so excel. There’s only this room and the kitchen; the kitchen serves as a bathroom, too. The loo’s down the hall. Really, it’s in a dreadful sort of mess. There’s no glass in the windows at all: they got broken so often, Olga just gave up. Last summer I had sheets of gauze put in: it was lovely, like living in a tent. Now it’s too cold for gauze, I’ve put in talc boards instead. It’s all right at night, with the curtains drawn. But in the daytime, it does tend to get me down. Makes me feel like a tart or something.’
She was screwing the corkscrew into the bottle as she spoke and now, with a little effort, she brought out the cork. She glanced at Helen as she poured the wine, and smiled. ‘Aren’t you going to take your things off?’
Rather reluctantly, Helen unwound her scarf, took off her hat, and started to unfasten the buttons of her coat. Her dress was the one she’d put on that morning—the Cedric Allen one with the cream lapels, which Kay admired so much. She’d kept it on, she realised now, with the idea of impressing Julia with it; but the sight of Julia herself, with her newly washed hair and crumpled trousers, her socks and slippers and colourless mouth—and, worse, the air of easy glamour with which she carried all this off—was disconcerting. She drew her arms from the coat clumsily, as if she’d never taken a coat off before in her life. Julia glanced her way again and said, ‘I say, what a swell you look! What’s the occasion?’
Helen hesitated. Then, ‘It’s my birthday,’ she said.
Julia thought she was joking, and laughed. When she saw that she was serious, her expression softened. ‘Helen! Why didn’t you tell me? If I’d known—’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Helen. ‘Really. It’s silly, how like a child the whole thing makes one feel. Everyone conspires in it. Kay gave me an orange,’ she added miserably. ‘She picked out Happy Birthday in the peel.’
Julia handed her a glass of red wine. ‘I’m glad she did,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you feel like a child about it.’
‘I wish she hadn’t,’ said Helen. ‘I was awful, today. I was worse than a child. I was—’ She couldn’t finish. She made some gesture, as if to brush away the memory of her own behaviour.
‘Never mind,’ said Julia gently. She lifted her glass. ‘Here’s how. Bung-ho. Cheerio.—And all those other idiotic things people say, which always make me feel I’m about to go off on my last mission. Touch top and bottom, for luck.’ They clinked glasses, twice, then drank. The wine was rough, and made them grimace.
They moved apart. Helen cleared a space for herself among the cushions on the divan. Julia perched on the arm of the pink velvet chair, stretching out her legs. Her legs seemed impossibly slender and long, in the flannel trousers; her hips had a fragile, vulnerable look—as if, Helen thought, you could place your two hands upon them and, with a pressing motion, make them snap. She’d picked up the ashtray, and now reached to the mantelpiece for cigarettes and matches. Her sweater rose up as she did it, and her shirt was unbuttoned at the bottom; the tails of it parted, exposing her tense, sallow stomach, her neat navel. Helen looked, then at once looked quickly away.
One of the cushions fell from the divan to the floor. Helen leant and picked it up again—and realised, as she did it, that it wasn’t a cushion but a pillow; that the divan must serve, in this two-roomed flat, as Julia’s bed; that every night Julia must stand here, lay down sheets and blankets, take off her clothes…The image was not exactly erotic, for one saw beds, pillows, night-clothes, everywhere; they’d long ago lost their charge of intimacy, of sex. Instead she found it poignant, faintly troubling. She looked again at Julia’s handsome, fragile figure and thought, What is it about Julia? Why is she always so alone?
They were sitting in silence. Helen found she had nothing to say. She gulped down more of her wine, then became aware of noises on the floor above: irregular steps, and creaking boards. She put back her head and looked up.
Julia looked up, too. ‘My neighbour’s a Polish man,’ she murmured. ‘He’s only in London by some sort of fluke. He walks about, like that, for hours. Every piece of news he gets from Warsaw, he says, is worse than the last.’
‘God,’ said Helen. ‘This wretched war. Do you really think it’s true, what everyone says? That it’ll be over soon?’
‘Who knows? If the Second Front kicks off, then perhaps. But I’d say we were in it for another year at least.’
‘Another year. So I’ll be thirty.’
‘And I’ll be thirty-two.’
‘The worst sort of ages, don’t you think? If we were twenty, we’d get over it, we’d still be almost young. And if we were forty, we’d be old enough not to mind being older still. But thirty…I’ll have gone from youth to middle age. What will I have to look fo
rward to? The change of life, I suppose. They say it’s worse for childless women. Don’t laugh! At least you’ll have achieved something, Julia. Your books, I mean.’
Julia drew in her chin, still smiling. ‘Them! They’re like so many crossword puzzles. I only wrote the first one, you know, as a sort of joke. Then I discovered I was rather good at them. What that reveals about me, I can’t imagine. Kay’s always said that it’s a queer thing to do—writing about murder, just now, while so many people are being murdered all around us.’
This was the second or third time that they had mentioned Kay’s name; but they both seemed struck by it, now, in a way they hadn’t been before. They sat in silence again. Julia swirled the wine in her glass, gazing fixedly into it like a fortune-teller. Without looking up, and in a different sort of voice, she said, ‘I never asked you. What did Kay make of our running into each other like that, that day?’
‘She was glad,’ said Helen, after a second.
‘And she didn’t mind us meeting up again? She won’t mind your coming round here, tonight?’
Helen sipped her drink and didn’t answer. When Julia looked up and caught her gaze, she must have coloured or seemed guilty. Julia frowned. She said, ‘You haven’t told her?’
Helen shook her head.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t think it worth mentioning? That’s fair enough, I suppose.’
‘No, Julia, it wasn’t that. Don’t be silly.’
Julia laughed. ‘What, then? Do you mind my asking? I’m curious. But I’ll shut up about it, if you’d rather. If it’s something, you know, between you and Kay—’
‘It’s nothing like that,’ said Helen quickly. ‘I told you, Kay was pleased to hear we’d met up. She’d be pleased, too, to think we’ve gone on meeting.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure! She’s so very fond of you; and that makes her want me to like you, too. It always has.’
‘How big of her. Do you like me, Helen?’
‘Well, naturally I do.’
‘There’s no naturally about it.’
‘Unnaturally, then,’ said Helen, making a face.
‘Yet you won’t tell Kay?’
Helen moved uncomfortably. She said, ‘I ought to have, I know. I wish I had. It’s just, sometimes, with Kay—’ She stopped. ‘It sounds childish, ungracious. It’s just, the way Kay is with me, taking such care of me. It makes me long, now and then, to keep things from her, even commonplace, trifling things. Just so that those things can be wholly mine.’
Her heart was fluttering as she spoke: she was afraid that Julia would hear the flutter in her voice. For even as she said all this, and meant it, she knew that it wasn’t quite the truth. She was trying to make the whole thing be about something else. She was playing it down, using words like commonplace and childish. She was trying to pretend that there wasn’t that fine, invisible, vibrating thread telling her when Julia moved, when Julia breathed…
Perhaps it worked. Julia smoked her cigarette for a time, looking thoughtful, but without speaking; then she tapped ash into the ashtray and got to her feet. ‘Kay wants a wife,’ she said. She smiled. ‘That sounds like a children’s game, doesn’t it? Kay wants a wife. She always has. One must be the wife with Kay, or nothing.’
She yawned, as if bored by the idea, then went to the window and drew back the curtain. There were little chinks, Helen could see, in the grey talc boards, and she put her eye to one of these and peered out. ‘Don’t you hate these evenings?’ she said. ‘Not knowing if the Warning will sound, and so on? It’s like waiting for an execution that might or might not take place.’
‘Would you rather I went?’ Helen asked.
‘God, no! I’m glad you’re here. It’s much worse when one’s alone, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, much worse. But bad in the shelters, too. Kay always wants me to go over to the one in Rathbone Place; but I can’t stand it, it makes me feel trapped. I’d always rather sit and be petrified on my own, than have strangers see me being frightened.’
‘Me, too,’ said Julia. ‘Sometimes I go out, you know. I like it better in the open space.’
‘You just go strolling,’ Helen asked her, ‘in the black-out? Isn’t it dangerous?’
Julia shrugged. ‘Probably. But then everything’s dangerous, just now.’ She let the curtain fall and turned back into the room, and reached for her glass.
Helen felt her heart begin to flutter again. It occurred to her that she’d far rather be with Julia outside, in darkness, than in here, in the soft, exposing, intimate light. She said, ‘Why don’t we go out now, Julia?’
Julia looked at her. ‘Now? You mean, for a walk? Would you like to?’
‘Yes,’ said Helen. She felt the wine inside her suddenly, and started to laugh.
Julia laughed, too. Her dark eyes were shining, with excitement and mischief. She began to move more quickly, putting back her head to drink off her wine, then carelessly setting down the glass on the mantelpiece, so that it rang against the painted marble. She looked at the fire, then squatted in front of it and began to shovel ash on the coke. She did it with the cigarette clamped at the side of her mouth, and with an expression of tremendous concentration and distaste: screwing up her eyes, holding her graceful head at an awkward angle away from the rising grey cloud—like a debutante, Helen thought, on the maid’s night off. Then she got up, and dusted off her knees; went back through the curtained doorway for her coat and shoes. She reappeared after a moment in a black double-breasted jacket with polished brass buttons, like a sailor’s coat. She stood at the mirror, put on lipstick, powdered her face, turned up her collar. She ran her hands, critically, over her damp head, then drew a soft black corduroy cap from out of a heap of gloves and scarves: pulled it on, and tucked up her hair.
‘I shall regret this, later,’ she said, ‘when my hair has dried at odd angles.’ She caught Helen’s eye. ‘I don’t look like Mickey, do I?’
Helen laughed, guiltily. ‘Not at all like Mickey.’
‘Not like a male impersonator on the stage?’
‘More like an actress in a spy-film.’
Julia adjusted the angle of the cap. ‘Well, so long as I don’t get us arrested for espionage…I tell you what, let’s take the rest of that wine.’ There was half a bottle left. ‘I shan’t want it tomorrow, and we’ve hardly touched it.’
‘That really might get us arrested.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve a plan for that.’
She went back to the cupboard, moved things around, and brought out the night watchman’s bottle that they’d had tea from, in Bryanston Square. She pulled the cork from it, and sniffed it, then carefully filled it up with wine. There was just enough. She stoppered it up again, and put it into her jacket pocket. In her other pocket she put a torch.
‘Now you look like a housebreaker,’ said Helen, as she buttoned on her own coat.
‘But you’re forgetting,’ said Julia; ‘I am a housebreaker, by day. Now, there’s just one more thing.’ She opened a drawer and took out a sheaf of papers. The papers were thin, the ‘flimsy’ kind that Helen was issued with at work. They were covered all over with close black handwriting.
‘That’s not your manuscript?’ asked Helen, impressed.
Julia nodded. ‘It’s a bore, but the bombs make me afraid for it.’ She smiled. ‘I suppose the wretched thing must be rather more to me than a sort of crossword puzzle, after all. I find I have to carry it about with me wherever I go.’ She rolled the papers up and stuffed them into the inside pocket of her coat. She patted the bulge they made. ‘Now I feel safe.’
‘But, if you get hit?’
‘Then I shan’t care one way or the other.’ She drew on gloves. ‘Are you ready?’
She led the way downstairs. As she opened the door she said, ‘I hate this bit. Let’s close our eyes and count, as we’re supposed to’—and so they stood on the step with their fa
ces screwed up, saying, ‘One, two, three…’
‘When do we stop?’ asked Helen.
‘…twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—now!’
They opened their eyes, and blinked.
‘Has that made a difference?’
‘I don’t think so. It’s still dark as hell.’
They switched on their torches and went down the steps. Julia’s face showed palely, strangely, framed by the lines of her turned-up collar and her cap. She said, ‘Which way shall we go?’
‘I don’t know. You’re the veteran at this sort of thing. You choose.’
‘All right,’ said Julia, suddenly deciding. She took Helen’s arm. ‘This way.’
They went left into Doughty Street; then left again, into the Gray’s Inn Road; and then right, towards Holborn. The roads, even in the short space of time in which Helen had been at Julia’s flat, had grown almost empty. There was only the occasional cab or lorry—like creeping black insects they seemed in the darkness, with gleaming, brittle-looking bodies and louvred, infernal eyes. The pavements, too, were almost clear, and Julia went quickly because of the cold. Helen could feel—as if with disturbing new senses, born of the dark—the weight and pressure of her arm and hand, the nearness of her face, her shoulder, her hip, her thigh, the roll and rhythm of her step.
At what must have been the junction with Clerkenwell Road they turned left. After a little while Julia made them turn again—right, this time. Helen looked around, suddenly confused.
‘Where are we?’
‘Hatton Garden, I think. Yes, it must be.’
They spoke quietly, for the street seemed deserted.
‘Do you know for sure? We won’t get lost?’
‘How can we get lost?’ asked Julia. ‘We don’t know where we’re going. Anyway, you can’t get lost in London, even in the black-out and with all the street-signs gone. If you can, you don’t deserve to live here. They should make it a kind of exam.’
‘If you fail, you get booted out?’
‘Exactly. And then,’ Julia laughed, ‘you must go and live in Brighton.’ They turned to the left, went down a short hill. ‘Look, this must be the Farringdon Road.’