The Night Watch (20 page)

The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She only had to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place; but she couldn't do it, she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn't feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn't feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes.
Perhaps Julia will come down and see me lying on the floor
, she thought, as she lay there; she thought, that if Julia did that, then she would at least realise the extremity of the feeling by which she, Helen, was gripped…

Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she'd lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She had often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she'd sometimes thought, in moments like this,
I'll burn myself
, or
I'll cut myself
. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be
there
, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within… Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem.
I won't be doing it
, she said to herself,
like some hysterical girl
.
I won't be doing it for Julia, hoping she'll come and catch me at it
.
It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor
.
I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret
.

She didn't allow herself to think what a very poor secret such a thing would be. She went quietly up to the kitchen and got her sponge-bag from the cupboard; came back down to the bathroom, softly closed and locked the door, and turned on the light; and at once felt better. The light was bright, like the lights you saw in hospital operating-rooms in films; the bare white surfaces of the bath and basin contributed, too, a certain clinical feeling, a sense of efficiency, even of duty. She was not in the least like some hysterical girl. She saw her face in the mirror again and the scarlet had faded from her cheek, she looked perfectly reasonable and calm.

She proceeded, now, as if she'd planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case which held the safety razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal and eased out the blade. How thin it was, how flexible! It was like holding nothing-a wafer, a counter in a game, a postage stamp. Her only concern was, where she might cut. She looked at her arms; she thought perhaps the inside of the arm, where the flesh was softer and might be supposed to yield more easily. She considered her stomach, for a similar reason. She didn't think of her wrists, ankles or shins, or any hard part like that. Finally she settled on her inner thigh. She put up a foot to the cold rounded lip of the bath; found the pose too cramped; lengthened her stride and braced her foot against the farther wall. She drew back her skirt, wondered about tucking it into her knickers, thought of taking it off entirely. For, suppose she should bleed on it? She had no idea how much blood to expect.

Her thigh was pale-creamy-pale, against the white of the bath-tub-and seemed huge beneath her hands. She'd never contemplated it in just this way before, and she was struck now by how perfectly featureless it was. If she were to see it in isolation, she'd hardly know it as a functioning piece of limb. She didn't think she would even recognise it as hers.

She put a hand upon the leg, to stretch the flesh tight between her fingers and her thumb; she listened once, to be sure that there was no-one out in the hall, able to hear her; then she brought the edge of the blade to the skin and made a cut. The cut was shallow, but impossibly painful: she felt it, like stepping in icy water, as a hideous shock to the heart. She recoiled for a moment, then tried a second time. The sensation was the same. She literally gasped.
Do it again, more swiftly!
she said to herself; but the thinness and flexibility of the metal, that had seemed almost attractive before, now struck her, in relation to the springing fatness of her thigh, as repulsive. The slicing was too precise. The cuts she'd made were filling with blood; the blood rose slowly, however-as if grudgingly-and seemed to darken and congeal at once. The edges of flesh were already closing: she put the razor blade down and pulled them apart. That made the blood come a little faster-at last it spilled from the skin and grew smeary. She watched, for a minute; two or three times more worked the flesh around the cuts, to make the blood flow again; then she rubbed the leg clean, as best she could, with a dampened handkerchief.

She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.

She sat down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some almost chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed-alive, and chastened. She'd lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do; she would have hated, for example, for Julia, or any of their friends, to have come upon her as she was doing it. She would have died of embarassment! And yet- She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way.
You perfect fool
, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.

Julia lay on her side, turned away from the door, her face in darkness, her hair very black against her pillow. It was impossible to say whether she was sleeping or awake.

'Julia,' said Helen, quietly.

'What?' asked Julia after a moment.

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Do you hate me?'

'Yes.'

'You don't hate me as much as I hate myself.'

Julia rolled on to her back. 'Do you say that, as some sort of consolation?'

'I don't know,' said Helen. She went closer, put her fingers to Julia's hair.

Julia flinched. 'Your hand's freezing. Don't touch me!' She took Helen's hand. 'For God's sake, why are you so cold? Where have you been?'

'In the bathroom. Nowhere.'

'Get into bed, can't you?'

Helen moved away, to take off her clothes, unpin her hair, draw on her nightdress. She did it all in a creeping, craven sort of way. Julia said again, when she'd got into the bed beside her, 'You're so cold!'

'I'm sorry,' said Helen. She hadn't noticed the chill, before; but now, feeling the warmth of Julia's body, she began to shake. 'I'm sorry,' she said again. Her teeth chattered in her head. She tried to make herself rigid; the trembling grew worse.

'God!' said Julia; but she put her arm around Helen and drew her close. She was wearing a boy's striped nightshirt: it smelt of sleep, of unmade beds, of unwashed hair-but pleasantly, deliciously. Helen lay against her and shut her eyes. She felt exhausted, emptied out. She thought of the evening that had passed, and it was astonishing to her that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.

Perhaps Julia thought the same. She lifted a hand and rubbed her face. 'What a ridiculous night!' she said.

'Do you really hate me, Julia?'

'Yes. No, I don't suppose so.'

'I can't help myself,' said Helen. 'I don't know myself, when I'm like that. It's like-'

But she couldn't explain it; she never could. It sounded childish, every time. She could never convey to Julia how utterly dreadful it was to have that seething, wizened little gnome-like thing spring up and consume you; how exhausting, to have to tuck it back into your breast when it was done; how frightening, to feel it there, living inside you, waiting its chance to spring again…

She said only, 'I love you, Julia.'

And Julia answered: 'Idiot. Go to sleep.'

They were silent after that. Julia lay tensely for a time, but soon her limbs began to slacken and her breaths to deepen and slow. Once, as if startled by a dream, she jumped, and that made Helen jump, too; but then she settled back into slumber. Out in the street, there were voices. Someone ran laughing along the pavement. In the house next door a plug was drawn from an electric socket, a window went squealing against its frame and was closed with a bang.

Julia stirred in her sleep, made uneasy by dreams again. Who, wondered Helen, was she dreaming of? Not Ursula Waring, after all.
But not of me, either
, Helen thought… For, wakeful, chastened, she saw it all very plainly now: Julia's staying out so late, when she might so easily have left a note; when she might so easily have done it differently, done it in secret, not done it at all…
Don't, Helen
, Julia said, in exasperation, every time. But if she didn't want bluster and fuss, why did she make it so easy for Helen to create them? With some part of herself, Helen thought, she must long for them. She must long for them because she knew that, beyond them, there was nothing: deadness, blankness, the arid surface of her own parched heart.

When did Julia stop loving me?
Helen wondered now. But it was too frightful a thought to pursue; and she was too exhausted. She lay open-eyed, still pressed close to Julia, still feeling the heat of her limbs, the rising and falling of her breaths. But in time she changed her pose, and moved away.

And as her hand slid across the cotton of Julia's nightshirt, she thought of something else-a silly thing-she thought of a pair of pyjamas she'd once owned, when the war was on, and then had lost. They were satin pyjamas, the colour of pearls: the most beautiful pyjamas, it seemed to her now, as she lay alone and untouched in the darkness at Julia's side; the most beautiful pyjamas she'd ever seen.

Duncan had come home from work that night and heated a kettle full of water; he'd taken the kettle up to his room, stripped down to his vest, and washed his hands, his face and his hair-trying to get the feel of the factory out of them; wanting to look his best, for his evening with Fraser.

Still in his vest and trousers he'd gone downstairs, to polish his shoes, to put a towel on the kitchen counter and iron a shirt. The shirt had a soft collar to it, like the shirts that Fraser wore; and when Duncan put it on, still hot from the iron, he left it unbuttoned at the throat-just as Fraser wore his. He thought, too, of leaving the Brylcreem off his hair. He went back up to his bedroom and stood at his mirror, combing the hair this way and that-trying out different partings, different ways of letting it tumble over his brow… But the hair, as it dried, began to grow downy; he began to remind himself of the little boy in the 'Bubbles' advert for Pears Soap. So he put the Brylcreem on after all-worrying that he'd left it too late; spending five or ten more minutes with the comb, trying to get the waves to sit right.

When he'd finished he went downstairs again and Mr Mundy said, with a dreadful forced sort of brightness, 'My word! The girls are in for a treat tonight, all right! What time's he coming for you, son?'

'Half-past seven,' said Duncan shyly, 'the same as last time. But we're going to a different pub, on a different bit of the river. They sell a better sort of beer, Fraser says.'

Mr Mundy nodded, his face still stretched in a ghastly smile. 'Yes,' he said, 'the girls won't know what's hit them tonight!'

He had not been able to believe it when Duncan had brought Fraser home, that other time, two weeks before. Fraser had not been able to believe it, either. The three of them had sat in the parlour together, at a loss for things to say; in the end the little cat had come trotting innocently in, and that had saved them. They'd spent twenty minutes making her chase after bits of string. Duncan had even got down on the floor and shown Fraser his trick of letting her walk up his body… Mr Mundy had gone around since then like a wounded man. His limp had worsened; he'd begun to stoop. Mr Leonard, in his crooked house in the street off Lavender Hill, had been very dismayed at the change in him. He spoke more passionately to him than ever about the necessity of resisting the lure of Error and False Belief.

Tonight, once Fraser arrived, Duncan planned to get out as quickly as he could. He and Mr Mundy ate their tea, then stood together washing up the dishes; and as soon as the dishes were stacked away, he put on his jacket. He sat in the parlour, at the very front of his chair-ready to spring up the moment he heard Fraser's knock.

But he picked up a book, too, to pass the time, and to make himself look careless. The book was a library book on antique silver, with a table of hallmarks: he worked his finger down the page, trying to memorise the significance of anchors, crowns, lions, thistles-but all the time, of course, listening out for that tap at the door… Half-past seven came and went. He began to grow tense. He started to imagine all the ordinary things that might be keeping Fraser away. He pictured Fraser coming breathlessly to the door-just as he had come breathlessly up to the factory gate, that other time. His face would be pink, his hair would be bouncing over his brow, and he'd say, 'Pearce! Had you given up on me? I'm so sorry! I've been-' The excuses grew wilder as the minutes ticked by. He'd been stuck in an Underground train, going out of his mind with frustration. He'd seen a person get hit by a car, and had to send for an ambulance!

By quarter past eight Duncan had begun to worry that Fraser might have come, have knocked, and gone away unheard. Mr Mundy had switched the wireless on, and the programme was rather noisy. So, on the pretext of getting himself a glass of water, he went out into the hall and stood quite still, cocking his head, listening for footsteps; he even, very softly, opened the front door and looked up and down the street. But there was no sign of Fraser… He went back into the parlour, leaving the door of it propped open. The radio programme changed, then changed again a half-hour later. The grandfather clock kept sending out its heavy, hollow chimes…