The Night Watch (14 page)

'Why? Do you want it?'

'That's not what I meant.'

'I've already eaten.'

'I bet you have. I know your meals. Tea and tobacco.'

'And gin, if I'm lucky!'

Mickey laughed again. The laugh became a cough. But, 'Eat it up,' she said, wiping her mouth. 'Go on. You're still too thin.'

'So what?' said Kay. 'Everybody's thin, aren't they? I'm in fashion, that's all.'

Actually the greasy, saccharine look of the bun had made her start to feel almost queasy; but now, for Mickey's sake, she picked the thing up and began to nibble at it. The sensation of the dough on her tongue and in her throat was horrible; but Mickey watched until she'd eaten it all.

'All right now, matron?'

'Not bad,' said Mickey, narrowing her eye, looking like the Artful Dodger again. 'Next time, I'll buy you a dinner.'

'You want to feed me up.'

'Why not? We could make a night of it, get a bit of a crowd together.'

Kay pretended to shudder. 'I'd be the skeleton at the feast. Besides-' she tossed her head like a debutante-'I'm awfully busy these days. I go out all the time.'

'You go to funny places.'

'I go to the cinema,' said Kay; 'there's nothing funny about that. Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way-people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures. Or perhaps that's just me… But you can get up to all sorts at the movies; you take my word for it. You can even-'

'Even what?'

Kay hesitated.
Even get up a woman
, she'd been going to say, crudely; for one night recently at the cinema she'd got talking to a tipsy girl, and had finished by leading the girl into an empty lavatory and kissing her and feeling her up. The thing had been rather savagely done; she felt ashamed, thinking of it now. 'Even nothing,' she said flatly, at last. 'Even nothing… Anyway, you could always come and visit me.'

'At Mr Leonard's?' Mickey made a face. 'He gives me the creeps.'

'He's all right. He's a miracle worker. One of his patients told me. He cured her shingles. He could fix your chest.'

Mickey drew back, coughing again. 'No fear!'

'You dear butch thing,' said Kay. 'He wouldn't actually have to look at it. You just sit in a chair and he whispers at you.'

'He sounds bloody depraved. You've been there too long; you can't tell how queer it is any more… And what about that house? When's it going to fall down?'

'It's on its way,' said Kay, 'believe me. When the wind gets up, I can feel it swaying. I can feel it groaning. It's like being at sea. I think it's only thanks to Mr Leonard that it stays up at all. I think he keeps the place standing through sheer force of mind.'

Mickey smiled. But she was looking into Kay's face, and her gaze had grown serious. And when her smile had faded she said, in a different sort of voice, 'How much longer are you going to stay there, Kay?'

'Till the day it collapses, I hope!'

'I mean it,' said Mickey. She hesitated, as if thinking something over. Then, 'Listen,' she said, leaning forward. 'Why don't you come and live here with me?'

'Live here?' said Kay, surprised. 'On the
Quaint Irene
?' She glanced around. 'She's not much bigger than a shoe-box. That's all right for a little powder-monkey like you.'

'Just for a while,' said Mickey. 'If I get that driving job, I'd be away on overnights.'

'What about the rest of the time? Say you brought a girl back?'

'We could work something out.'

'Hang up a blanket? No fear! I might as well be back at boarding-school… Besides, I couldn't leave Lavender Hill. You don't know what it means to me. I'd miss Mr Leonard. I'd miss the little boy with his great big boot. I'd miss the Stanley Spencer couple! I've grown attached to the old place.'

'I know you have,' said Mickey. She said it in a way that meant:
That's what bothers me
.

Kay looked away. She'd been talking lightly all this time-putting on an act, trying to hide the fact that, as before, real emotion was rising up in her, making her embarassed and afraid. For here, she thought, was Mickey, on about a pound a week, ready to share it-just like that, at the drop of a hat, through simple kindness. And here was Kay herself, with money unspent, and with absolutely nothing wrong with her, living like a cripple, like a rat…

She moved forward and picked up her tea. She found, to her horror, that her hands were shaking. She didn't want to put the mug back down and draw attention to the tremor; she lifted it higher, and tried to meet it with her mouth. But the tremor grew worse. Tea spilled; she saw it stain one of Mickey's cushions. Abruptly, she set the mug down again and tried to mop up the worst of it with her handkerchief.

She caught Mickey's eye as she was doing it; and her shoulders sank. She leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands.

'Look at me, Mickey!' she said. 'Look at the creature I've become! Did we really do those things we did?-you and I, when the war was on? Sometimes I can't bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings. We carried stretchers, for God's sake! I remember lifting-' She spread her hands. 'I remember lifting the torso of a child… What the hell happened to me, Mickey?'

'You know what happened,' Mickey said softly.

Kay sat back and turned away, in disgust at herself. 'It's no more than happened to thousands of us. Who didn't lose someone, or something? I could walk on any street in London, stretch out my arm, touch a woman or a man who lost a lover, a child, a friend… But I- I can't get over it, Mickey. I can't get over it.' She laughed, unhappily. '
Get over it
. What a funny phrase that is! As if one's grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one's way over the rubble to the ground on the other side… I've got lost in my rubble, Mickey. I can't seem to find my way across it. I don't think I
want
to cross it, that's the thing. The rubble has all my life in it still-'

For a second she couldn't go on. She looked around the cabin of the boat; then spoke more quietly.

'Do you remember that night, when we all sat here? That night just before-? Sometimes I think about times like that. I bloody torture myself with thinking about times like that!
Do
you remember it?'

Mickey nodded. 'I remember it.'

'I'd been to that place in Bethnal Green. You made gin slings.'

'Gin gimlets.'

Kay looked up. 'Gin gimlets? Are you sure?' Mickey nodded. 'Weren't there lemons?'

'Lemons? Where the hell would we have got lemons? We had lime juice, remember, in a bottle of Binkie's?'

Kay did remember it, now. The fact that she'd misremembered before-misremembered to the extent that she'd been able to picture Mickey actually cutting up the lemons, squeezing out the juice-made her uneasy.

'Lime juice,' she said, frowning, 'in a bottle. Why should I have forgotten that?'

'Don't think about it, Kay.'

'I don't want to think about it! But I don't want to forget it, either. Sometimes I can think of nothing else but things like that. My mind has hooks in it. Little hooks-'

But now she sounded almost crazy. She turned her head again, and looked out of the window. The sunlight made patterns on the water. A slick of oil had colours in, silver and blue… She turned back into the cabin, and found Mickey checking her watch.

'Kay,' said Mickey, embarassed. 'I'm sorry, mate. I've got to get back to Sandy 's.'

'Of course you have.'

'Why don't you stay here till I get home?'

'Don't be silly. I'm all right, really. It's a bore, that's all.'

She finished her tea. Her hand was quite steady now. She brushed crumbs from her lap, got to her feet, and helped clear away the plates.

'What'll you do now?' Mickey asked her, as they made their way down the Harrow Road.

Kay became a debutante again. She made a flighty gesture. 'Oh, I've heaps of things.'

'Have you, really?'

'Yes, of course.'

'I don't believe you. Have a think about what I said-about coming to live with me. Will you? Or come out, some time! We could go for a drink. We could go to Chelsea. There's no-one there these days, the crowd's all changed-'

'All right,' said Kay.

She got out her cigarettes again, took one for herself, gave one to Mickey; and tucked another behind one of Mickey's boyish little ears. Mickey caught hold of her hand when she had done it, and gave it a squeeze; they stood for a second, smiling into each other's eyes.

They had kissed once, Kay remembered-years ago, and without success. They'd both been drunk. They'd ended up laughing. That's what happened, of course, when you were both, as it were, on the same side…

Mickey moved away. 'Ta-ta, Kay,' she said. Kay watched her running back to the garage. She saw her turn, once, to wave. Kay raised her hand, then started to walk, back in the direction of Bayswater.

She walked briskly, for as long as she thought that Mickey might be watching; but as soon as she'd turned a corner, she slowed her step. And when she got to Westbourne Grove and the street grew busy, she found a doorstep in the shadow of a broken wall, and sat down. She thought of what she'd said to Mickey, about standing in a crowd, stretching out her hand… And she studied the faces of the people as they passed, thinking,
What did you lose? How about you? How do you bear it? What do you do?

'I knew that girl from Enfield was trouble the second she walked in,' Viv was saying, as she sprinkled Vim on the cloth. 'They always are, that brassy type.'

She and Helen had just been about to take their lunches out to the fire-escape when they'd spotted pencil-marks on the lavatory wall.

A long and thin goes right in

But a short and thick does the trick!

somebody had written, on the paint above the roller-towel. Helen had not, for a second, known where to look. Viv seemed hardly less embarassed. 'This is what comes,' she said now, rubbing madly, 'of advertising in those local magazines.'

She stepped back, flushed and blinking. The wall was pale where she had cleaned it, but the words
thick
and
does the trick!
still showed, scored faintly into the paint. She rubbed again, then she and Helen moved about, narrowing their eyes, holding their heads at different angles to the light… They became aware, all at once, of what they were doing. They looked at each other and started to laugh.

'Dear me,' said Helen, biting her lip.

Viv rinsed out the cloth and put away the Vim, her shoulders shaking. She dried her hands, then lifted her knuckles to her eyes, afraid for her mascara. 'Don't!' she said.

Still laughing, they opened the window and clambered out. They sat and unwrapped their sandwiches, sipped their tea and grew calmer at last; then caught one another's gaze and started laughing all over again.

Viv set down her spilling cup. 'Oh, what would the clients think?'

Her mascara had run after all. She got out a handkerchief, made a twist of it, put the twist to the tip of her tongue, then held up a mirror and widened her eyes, rubbing beneath them almost as savagely, Helen thought, as she'd rubbed at the marks on the lavatory wall. The blood, in rushing into her face, had made her seem youthful. Her hair was disarranged by laughter; she looked tousled, full of life.

But she tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve and picked up her sandwich; and her laughter faded into sighs. She put back a corner of the bread, and the sight of the vivid meat inside it-and the taste of it, when she'd bitten-seemed for some reason to subdue her. Her face lost its flush. Her eyes dried. She chewed very slowly, and finally put the sandwich down. She was wearing a cardigan over her dress, and began fastening up its buttons.

It was almost two weeks since that warm Saturday, when Helen had lain with Julia in Regent's Park. That had been the last warm day of the summer, though they hadn't known it then. The season had turned. The sun was moving in and out of clouds. Viv put back her head to look at the sky.

'Not quite so warm today,' she said.

'No, not quite,' said Helen.

'I suppose we'll all be complaining, soon, about the cold.'

Helen saw winter, drawing nearer, like a long dark tunnel on a railway line. She said, 'It won't be so cold as last year, will it?'

'I hope not.'

'It won't be, surely!'

Viv rubbed her arms. 'A man in the
Evening Standard
said our winters will go on getting colder and colder, and longer and longer; that in another ten years we'll all be living like Eskimos.'

'Eskimos!' said Helen-picturing fur hats and wide, friendly faces; quite fancying the idea.

'That's what he said. He said it was something to do with the angle of the earth-that we'd knocked it off-balance with all those bombs. It makes sense, if you think about it. He said it served us all right.'

'Oh,' said Helen, 'people in newspapers are always writing things like that. Do you remember someone, at the start of the war, saying the whole thing was a punishment on us for letting our king abdicate?'

'Yes!' said Viv. 'I always thought that was a bit hard on everyone in France and Norway and places like that. I mean, it wasn't their king, after all.'

She turned her head. The door to the wig-maker's downstairs had opened, and a man had come out into the yard with a waste-paper basket under his arm. The basket was filled to overflowing with dark fibres-a mixture, probably, of netting and hair. Viv and Helen watched him cross to a dustbin, lift its lid, and empty the mess of fibres into it. Then he wiped his hands, and went back in. He didn't look up. When the door was closed, Viv made a face.

But Helen was still thinking about the war. She took another little bite of her sandwich, then said, 'Isn't it odd, how everyone talks about the war as if it were a thing-oh, from years ago. It feels almost quaint. It's as though we all got together in private and said to each other, “Now don't, for God's sake, let's mention
that
!” When did that happen?'