The Night Watch

by Sarah Waters

  There were cabs again here, other pedestrians, a feeling of space—but a dreary feel, too, for half of the buildings that lined the street had been damaged and boarded up. Julia led Helen south, towards the river. At a warden’s post in one of the arches underneath Holborn Viaduct, a man heard their voices and blew his whistle.

  ‘Those two ladies! They must get themselves a white scarf or a paper, please!’

  ‘All right,’ called Helen meekly in reply.

  But Julia murmured: ‘Suppose we want to be invisible?’

  They crossed Ludgate Circus and went on towards the start of the bridge. They saw people going down into the Underground with bags and blankets and pillows, and paused to watch them.

  ‘It gives one a shock, doesn’t it,’ said Helen quietly, ‘to see people doing this, after all this time? I hear the queues still start at four and five o’clock at some of the stations. I couldn’t bear to do it, could you?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t bear it,’ said Julia.

  ‘They’ve got nowhere else, though. And look, it’s all old ladies and men, and children.’

  ‘It’s horrible. People being made to live like moles. It’s like the Dark Ages. It’s worse than that. It’s prehistoric.’

  There was something elemental, it was true, to the heavily laden figures, as they made their uncertain way into the dimly lighted mouth of the Underground. They might have been mendicants or pedlars; refugees from some other, medieval, war—or else, from some war of the future, as imagined by H. G. Wells or a fanciful writer like that. Then Helen caught snatches of their conversation: ‘Head over heels! How we laughed!’ ‘A pound of onions and a saddle of pork.’ ‘He said, “It’s got fancy teeth.” I said, “It ought to have better teeth than I’ve got, at that price…”’

  She pulled at Julia’s arm. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The river.’

  They walked to the middle of the bridge, then turned off their torches and looked out, westwards. The river ran gleamlessly beneath a starless sky, so black it might have been of treacle or of tar—or might not have been a river at all, but a channel, a gash in the earth, impossible to fathom…The sensation of feeling yourself supported at a height above it, by an almost-invisible bridge, was very unnerving. Helen and Julia had unlinked their arms, to lean and peer; now they moved close together again.

  As Helen felt the pressure of Julia’s shoulder against her own she remembered, with awful vividness, standing on the quaint little bridge on Hampstead Heath, a few hours before, with Kay. She said quietly, ‘Damn.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Julia. But she spoke quietly, too, as if she knew what the matter was. And when Helen didn’t answer she said, ‘Do you want to go back?’

  ‘No,’ said Helen, after a little hesitation. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  So they were still for another moment, then started to walk again: back, at first, the way they had come; back to the bottom of Ludgate Hill. Here, without debate, they turned, and headed up towards St Paul’s.

  The streets grew quieter again and, once they’d passed under the railway bridge, the mood of the city seemed transformed. There was a sense—for it could not be seen, so much as felt—of exposed ground, unnatural space. The pavements were edged with fences and hoardings, but Helen found her thoughts slipping past the flimsy panels of wood to the rubble, the burnt and broken things, the uncovered girders and yawning basements and smashed brick, beyond. She and Julia walked without speaking, awed by the strangeness of the place. They stopped at the base of the cathedral steps and Helen looked up, trying to trace the outline of the huge, irregular silhouette against the dark of the sky.

  ‘I looked at this, this afternoon,’ she said, ‘from Parliament Hill.’ She didn’t say she had also looked, anxiously, for Mecklenburgh Square; she’d forgotten it herself, for the moment. ‘How it seemed to loom over London! Like a great big toad.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia. She seemed to shudder. ‘I’m never very sure I like it here. Everyone says how grateful they are, that St Paul’s hasn’t been touched, but—I don’t know, it seems freakish to me.’

  Helen looked at her. ‘You can’t wish it had been bombed?’

  ‘I’d rather it had been bombed, naturally, than a family in Croydon or Bethnal Green. Meanwhile it sits here, like—not like a toad, but like some great Union Jack, or—like Churchill, “Britain can take it”, all of that—somehow making it all right that the war’s still going on.’

  ‘It does make it all right, though—doesn’t it?’ asked Helen quietly. ‘In the sense, I mean, that while we’ve still got St Paul’s—I’m not talking about Churchill, or flags. But while we’ve still got this and all it stands for: I mean, elegance, and reason, and—and great beauty—then the war is still worth fighting. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Is that what this war’s about?’ asked Julia.

  ‘What do you think it’s about?’

  ‘I think it’s about our love of savagery, rather than our love of beauty. I think the spirit that went into the building of St Paul’s has shown itself to be thin: it’s like gold leaf, and now it’s rising, peeling away. If it couldn’t keep us from the last war, and it couldn’t keep us from this—from Hitler and Hitlerism, from Jew-hatred, from the bombing of women and children in cities and towns—what use is it? If we have to fight so hard to keep it—if we have to have elderly men patrolling the roofs of churches, to sweep incendiaries from them with little brushes!—how valuable can it be? How much at the centre of the human heart?’

  Helen shivered—impressed, suddenly, by the awful sadness of Julia’s words; and glimpsing a sort of darkness in her—a frightening, baffling darkness. She touched her arm.

  ‘If I thought like that, Julia,’ she said softly, ‘I’d want to die.’

  Julia was still for a moment, then moved—took a step, swept her foot, kicked gravel. ‘I suppose,’ she said, in a lighter voice, ‘I don’t think like it, really; or I’d want to die, too. It’s a thing one can’t think, can one? Instead one concentrates one’s mind’—she must have been remembering the men and women they’d seen going into the Underground with pillows—‘on the price of combs; on pork and onions. On cigarettes. Do you want one, by the way?’

  They laughed, and the darkness passed. Helen drew back her hand. Julia brought out a packet from her pocket, fumbling slightly because of her gloves. She struck a match, and her face sprang startlingly into life, yellow and black. Helen bent her head to the flame, then straightened up and made to move on. The light had made her feel blind again. When Julia tugged at her arm, she let herself be led.

  Then she saw where Julia was heading: eastwards, towards the ground beyond St Paul’s. ‘This way?’ she asked, in surprise.

  ‘Why not?’ answered Julia. ‘There’s somewhere, now, I’d like to take you. If we keep to the road, I think we’ll be all right.’

  So they left the cathedral behind and started on the line of stone and broken tarmac that had once been Cannon Street, but was now more like the idea or the ghost of a road, on a landscape that might have been flat open country. Within a minute or two the sky seemed to have expanded over their heads, giving the illusion of light; as before, however, they could not see so much as sense the devastation that lay about them: they tried to peer into the utter darkness of the ground, and their gazes slid about. Two or three times Helen put her hand to her eyes as if to wipe veils or cobwebs from them. They might have been walking through murky water, so absolutely strange and dense was the quality of the night here, and so freighted with violence and loss.

  They kept the beams of their torches very low, following the whitened line of the kerb. Every time a car or a lorry passed they slowed their step, pressed themselves against the feeble-seeming fences that had been put there to separate pavement from rubble, and felt earth and bramble and broken stone beneath their shoes. When they spoke, they spoke in murmurs.

  Julia said, ‘I remember making this walk, on N
ew Year’s Day in 1941. The road was almost impassable, even on foot. I came to look at the damaged churches. I think even more have gone since then. Back there’—she nodded over her left shoulder—‘must be the remains of St Augustine’s. It was bad enough when I saw it then; it was bombed again, wasn’t it, right at the end of the last blitz?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Helen.

  ‘I think it was. And ahead of us, there—can you see?’ She gestured. ‘You can just make it out—that must be all that’s left of St Mildred, Bread Street. That was awfully sad…’

  She named more churches as they walked: St Mary-le-Bow, St Mary Aldermary, St James, St Michael; she seemed to be able to identify, quite clearly, the shapes of their battered towers and attenuated spires, while Helen struggled to pick them out at all. Now and then she flicked the beam of her torch across the waste-ground, to guide Helen’s eye; the light caught fragments of broken glass, patches of frost, and found colour: the green and brown and silver of nettle, bracken, thistle. Once it lit up the eyes of some creature.

  ‘Look, there!’

  ‘Is it a cat?’

  ‘It’s a fox! Look at its red tail!’

  They watched it dart, as quick and fluid as racing water; they tried to follow it with their torch-beams as it ran. Then they turned their torches off and listened, heard the rustling of leaves and the shifting of earth. But that soon became unnerving. They thought of rats, adders, vagrants. They went on, more quickly, heading away from the open ground to the shelter of the streets behind Cannon Street Station.

  The buildings here were offices and banks: some had been gutted in 1940 and left unrepaired, some were still in use, but at this sort of hour on a Saturday night it was impossible to tell the exact condition of any of them; they all had an equally haunted look—more weird, in its way, than the heath-like feel of the blasted place where buildings had been lost completely.

  If the streets around Ludgate Circus had been quiet, here they seemed utterly deserted. Only now and then, from deep beneath the broken pavements, came the rumbling of the Underground; as if herds of great, complaining creatures were hurling themselves through the city sewers—as, in a way, thought Helen, they were.

  She gripped Julia’s arm more tightly. It was always disconcerting, in a black-out, leaving the places you knew best. A particular feeling started to creep over you, a mixture of panic and dread: as if you were walking through a rifle-range with a target on your back…‘We must be mad, Julia,’ she whispered, ‘to be here!’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘Are you frightened?’

  ‘Yes! Anyone could come at us out of the dark.’

  ‘But if we can’t see them, they can’t see us. Besides, they’d probably take us for a boy and his girl. Last week I went out in this coat and cap, and a tart in a doorway thought I was a chap and showed me her breast—flashed her torch at it. That was in Piccadilly.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Helen.

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘And I can’t tell you how odd a single breast looks, when lit up in the dark like that.’

  She slowed her step and swung her torch. ‘Here’s St Clement’s,’ she said, ‘the church from the nursery rhyme. They used to bring oranges and lemons, I suppose, to the shore of the Thames, just down there.’

  Helen thought of the orange Kay had given her that morning. But Kay and the morning felt far away, in a place like this. They were on the other side of that mad, impossible landscape.

  They crossed a road. ‘Where are we now?’

  ‘This must be Eastcheap. We’re nearly there.’

  ‘Nearly where?’

  ‘Only another church, I’m afraid. You won’t be disappointed?’

  ‘I’m thinking of the walk we must do, to get home. We’ll get our throats cut.’

  ‘How you fret!’ said Julia. She made Helen walk a little further, then drew her towards a narrowish opening between two buildings. ‘This is Idol Lane,’ she murmured—or she might, Helen supposed, have said ‘Idle Lane’. ‘It’s just along here.’

  Helen hung back. ‘It’s too dark!’

  ‘But it’s just down here,’ said Julia.

  Her grip slid from Helen’s elbow to her hand. She squeezed her fingers, and led her down a sloping path and then, a little way along it, made her stop. She swung up the beam of her torch and Helen could just make out, in the sweep of it, the shape of a tower: a high and elegant tower, with a sharp, slender spire supported by arches or buttresses—or simply blown through, perhaps, by bomb-blast, for the body of the church from which it rose seemed to be roofless, gutted, quite wrecked.

  ‘St Dunstan-in-the-East,’ said Julia quietly, looking up. ‘It was rebuilt by Wren, like most of these churches, after the Great Fire of 1666. But they say that his daughter, Jane, helped him to design it. She’s supposed to have gone to the top to lay the last stones, when the mason lost his nerve. And when they drew away the scaffolding, she lay down here, to show her faith that the tower wouldn’t fall…I like to come here. I like to think of her making her way up the tower steps, with bricks and a trowel. She couldn’t have been at all delicate, yet the portraits of her have made her out to be pale and slight. Shall we stay here a minute? Are you too cold?’

  ‘No, I’m all right. Not inside the church, though.’

  ‘No, just here. If we keep to the shadow, any sort of footpad or cutthroat could go by, and never know we were here.’

  They walked cautiously around the tower, still hand in hand, guiding themselves by a set of broken railings and feeling for uneven ground. A flight of three or four shallow stone steps ran up to each of the tower doors; they made their way up to one of these doors, and sat down. The stone was icily cold. The doors, and the walls around them, were black, and threw off no light: Helen looked for Julia in her cap and dark coat and could hardly see her.

  But she felt the movement of her arm, as she dipped her fingers into her pocket and brought out the night watchman’s bottle. And she heard the moist little pop of the stopper coming out of the glass neck. Julia handed the bottle over, and Helen raised it to her mouth. The rough red liquid met her lips and seemed to flare across her tongue like a flame. She swallowed, and felt easier almost at once.

  ‘We might,’ she whispered, as she handed the bottle back, ‘be the only people alive in the City. Do you think there are ghosts here, Julia?’

  Julia was drinking. She wiped her mouth. ‘There might be the ghost of Samuel Pepys. He used to come to this church. Once he was set upon by a couple of robbers here.’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to know that,’ said Helen, ‘if I weren’t tipsy.’

  ‘You got tipsy rather quick.’

  ‘I was tipsy before, I just didn’t like to say. Anyway, it’s my birthday and I’m allowed to be tipsy.’

  ‘Then I ought to get tipsy, too. There’s no pleasure in being tipsy on your own.’

  They drank more, then sat without speaking. At last Helen, very softly, began to sing.

  Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s.

  Pancakes and fritters, say the bells of St Peter’s.

  ‘What mad sort of words they are, aren’t they?’ she said, interrupting herself. ‘I didn’t even know I’d remembered them, until now.’

  Bull’s eyes and targets, say the bells of St Margaret’s.

  Pokers and tongs, say the bells of St John’s.

  Julia said, ‘You sing nicely. I don’t suppose there’s a St Helen’s in the song?’

  ‘I don’t think so. What would those bells say?’

  ‘I can’t imagine. Strawberries and melons?’

  ‘Torturers and felons…What about St Julia?’

  ‘I don’t think there ever was a St Julia. Anyway, nothing rhymes with Julia. Except peculiar.’

  ‘You’re about the most unpeculiar person I’ve ever met, Julia.’

  They had put back their heads against the black tower door, and turned their faces to each o
ther, to speak softly. When Julia laughed, Helen felt the rush of breath against her own mouth: warm, wine-scented, slightly soured by tobacco.

  ‘You don’t think it’s peculiar,’ Julia said, ‘to have brought you here, to the ruin of a church, in the middle of a black-out?’

  ‘I think it’s marvellous,’ said Helen simply.

  Julia answered, still laughing, ‘Have some more wine.’

  Helen shook her head. Her heart had risen into her throat. Too high and full, it felt, to swallow back down. ‘I don’t want any more,’ she said softly. ‘The fact is, Julia, I’m afraid to be drunk while I’m with you.’

  It seemed to her that there could be no mistaking the meaning of her words: that they had penetrated some thin but resilient membrane, made a tear through which a heap of unruly passions would now come tumbling…But Julia laughed again, and must have turned her head, for her breath no longer came against Helen’s lips; and when she spoke, she spoke musingly, distantly. She said, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary, though, that we know each other so little? Three weeks ago, when we had that cup of tea outside Marylebone Station—do you remember? I would never have said, then, that we’d be here now, like this…’

  ‘Why did you stop me that day, Julia?’ asked Helen, after a moment. ‘Why did you ask me to have tea with you?’

  ‘Why did I?’ said Julia. ‘Shall I tell you? I’m almost afraid to. It might make you hate me. I did it—well, out of curiosity, I suppose you’d have to call it.’

  ‘Curiosity?’

  ‘I wanted to—get the measure of you, something like that.’ She gave an uncomfortable little laugh. ‘I thought you might have guessed it.’

  Helen didn’t answer. She was remembering the odd, sly way in which Julia had glanced at her, when they’d been talking about Kay; she was thinking of the feeling she’d had, that Julia was testing her, weighing her up. She said slowly at last, ‘I think I did guess. You wanted to see, didn’t you, if you could find in me what Kay does?’

  Julia moved. ‘It was a lousy thing to do. I’m sorry, now.’