The Night Watch (28 page)

'I think the dirt's there permanently. Do you mind?'

'Of course not.'

They shook hands. Julia said, 'Where are you going?'

'I'm going back to work,' answered Helen, a little self-consciously; for something about Julia-Julia's manner, Julia's clear, upper-class voice-always made her shy. 'I've just had lunch. I work just over there, in the Town Hall.'

'The Town Hall?' Julia peered along the street. 'We've probably passed one another before, then, and not noticed. My father and I've been working our way through all the streets around here. We've set up a sort of headquarters, in a house on Bryanston Square. We've been there for a week. He's just gone off to see a warden, and I'm making it an excuse for a little sit down.'

Julia's father, Helen knew, was an architect. He was making a survey of bomb-damaged buildings, and Julia was helping. But Helen had always imagined them working miles away, in the East End or somewhere like that. She said, ' Bryanston Square? How funny! I walk through there all the time.'

'Do you?' asked Julia

They looked at each other, for a second, frowning and smiling. Then Julia went on, more briskly, 'How are you, anyway?'

Helen shrugged, rather shy again. 'I'm all right. A bit tired, of course; like everyone. How are you? Are you writing?'

'Yes, a little.'

'You manage to do it, in between bangs?'

'Yes, in between bangs. It keeps my mind off them, I think. I'm just reading this-' she showed the book-'as a way of checking out the competition… But tell me, how's Kay?'

She asked it, perfectly easily; but Helen felt herself blush. She nodded. 'Kay's all right.'

'Still at the Station? At Dolphin Square?'

'Yes. Still there.'

'With Mickey? And Binkie? They're quite a pair, aren't they?'

Helen laughed, agreeing that they were… The sun grew brighter, and Julia lifted the book to her brow, to make a shade. But she kept her gaze on Helen's face as she did it, as if turning something over in her mind.

Then, 'Look,' she said. She tugged at her wristwatch, which had worked its way around her arm. 'My father will be ten minutes yet. I was just about to go and get myself a cup of tea. There's a canteen thing up by the station. Care to join me? Or do you have to get back to work?'

'Well,' said Helen, surprised. 'I ought to be back at my desk, as it happens.'

'Ought you? But, look at it this way. The tea will make you work harder.'

'Well, perhaps,' said Helen.

She was still aware of having blushed; and she didn't want Julia to suppose that she couldn't stand in a street and talk about Kay, as if the whole thing weren't perfectly natural, perfectly fine… And Kay herself would be pleased to hear they'd met up; she thought of it like that. So she glanced at her own watch, then smiled and said, 'All right, so long as we're quick. I'll brave the wrath of Miss Chisholm, just this once.'

'Miss Chisholm?'

'A colleague of mine, and frightfully proper. Her pursed lips are something awful… She scares the life out of me, to be honest.'

Julia laughed. They started to walk. They went very quickly up the street and joined a short line of people waiting to be served at the window of a mobile canteen.

The day, though sunny and almost breezeless, was cold. The winter so far had been a very bitter one. But that made the blueness of today's sky, Helen thought, more lovely. Everyone looked cheerful, as if reminded of happier times. A soldier in khaki had leaned his kitbag and rifle against the canteen van and was lazily rolling a cigarette. The girl in front of Helen and Julia was wearing sunglasses. The elderly man in front of her had on a cream Panama hat. But he and the girl had gas-mask boxes hung over their shoulders, too: people had dug them out, Helen had noticed, and started carrying them again. And fifty yards further along the Marylebone Road an office building had been freshly bombed: an emergency water tank had been set up; there were scraps of wet, charred paper clinging to the pavements, a coating of ash on walls and trees, and muddy tracks leading in and out of the wreckage where hoses had been dragged across the street.

The queue moved forward. Julia asked for teas from the girl behind the counter. Helen took out her purse, and there was the usual women's quarrel over who should pay. In the end, Julia did; she said it was her idea in the first place. The tea looked ghastly, anyway: greyish, probably made from chlorinated water, and the milk was powdered and formed lumps. Julia picked up the cups and led Helen a little way off, to a heap of sandbags underneath a boarded window. The bags had had the sun on them; they smelt, not unpleasantly, of drying jute. Some had split, and showed pale earth, the limp remains of flowers and grass.

Julia pulled on a broken stalk. '“Nature triumphant over war”,' she said, in a wireless voice; for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio-the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bomb-sites, the new species of bird, all of that-it had got terribly boring. She sipped her tea, then made a face: 'God, this is awful.' She got out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. 'You won't mind my smoking in the street?'

'Of course not.'

'Want one?'

'I've got my own here somewhere-'

'Don't be silly. Here.'

'Well, thanks.'

They shared the flame, their heads coming rather close together, the smoke rising up and into their eyes. Without thinking, Helen touched her fingers, very lightly, to Julia's hand.

'Your knuckles are grazed,' she said.

Julia looked. 'So they are. That must be from broken glass.' She lifted the knuckles to her mouth and sucked them. 'I had to lower myself through the fan-light of a house this morning.'

'Goodness!' said Helen. 'Like Oliver Twist!'

'Yes, just like that.'

'Isn't that illegal?'

'So you might think. But we have a sort of special dispensation, my father and I. If a house is empty and we can't get hold of the keys, we're allowed to get in however we can. It's a filthy business, not at all as exciting as it sounds: the rooms all smashed, the carpets wrecked, the mirrors in splinters. The water-pipes might have had it: the water runs and turns the soot to sludge. I went into places last month and found things frozen: sofas and tablecloths and things like that. Or, things get burned. An incendiary will land on a roof: it might burn right through, quite neatly, from one floor to the next; you can stand in the basement and look at the sky… I find damage like that more miserable, somehow, than if a house has been blasted to bits: it's like a life with a cancer in it.'

'Is it frightening?' asked Helen, very taken with Julia's description. 'I think it would frighten me.'

'It spooks me a bit. Then there's always the chance, of course, of discovering someone-a looter, who's got in the same way you did. Boys who've gone in for a lark. You see rotten drawings on the walls, sometimes; you pity the family that must come back. Then again, sometimes the house hasn't been abandoned at all. My father got into one, a few months ago: he went into every room to look at the damage, and in the last room of all was a very old woman, in a yellow night-dress and with silver hair, asleep in a four-poster bed with tattered curtains.'

Helen saw the scene, quite clearly. She said, fascinated, 'What did your father do?'

'He left her to it-went silently back downstairs; then told the local warden. The warden said the old woman had a girl who came and cooked her dinners for her, and lit her fires; that she was ninety-three, and could never be got to come out when a raid was on. That she remembered seeing Prince Albert with Queen Victoria once in a carriage in Hyde Park…'

The sun, all the time that Julia was speaking, was moving in and out of cloud. When it grew bright she put her hand to her eyes or, as she had before, lifted her book; now, its growing brighter than ever, she stopped talking, shut her eyes completely for a moment and put back her head.

How lovely she is!
thought Helen suddenly, jolted out of the story about the old woman; for the sun lit Julia as a spot-light might, and the blue of the dungarees and the jacket set off the tan of her face, the dark of her lashes and neat, straight brows; and because her hair was swept up by the turban you saw more clearly the graceful lines of her jaw and her throat. She had parted her lips. Her mouth was full, slightly crowded, the teeth not quite even. But even that was lovely, somehow: one of those flaws of feature which mysteriously render a handsome face more handsome than genuine flawlessness could.

No wonder
, Helen thought, with a queer mix of feelings-envy, and admiration, and a slight sinking of heart-
No wonder Kay was in love with you
.

For that was all the connection she and Julia had. They could not be said, even, to be friends. Julia was Kay's friend, as Mickey was-or rather, not at all as Mickey was, for she did not, as Mickey did, spend time with Kay and Helen, at their flat, in pubs, at parties. She wasn't open and easy and kind. She had a queer sort of mystery to her-a sort of glamour, Helen thought it.

The mystery and glamour had been there, right from the start. 'You must meet Julia,' Kay had used to say, after Helen had moved into her flat. 'I do so want you two to meet up.' But there had always been something in the way of it: Julia was busy, Julia was writing; Julia kept odd hours and could never be pinned down… They'd met, at last, about a year before, by accident: bumped into each other at the theatre, after a performance of-of all things-
Blithe Spirit
. Julia had been handsome, charming, frightening, remote: Helen had taken one look at her; noted the awkward, slightly flustered manner with which Kay introduced her; and guessed everything.

Later that night she'd asked Kay: 'What was there, between you and Julia?'-and Kay had instantly grown awkward again.

'Nothing,' she'd said.

'Nothing?'

'A sort of-misaffection, that was all. Ages ago.'

'You were in love with her,' Helen had said, bluntly.

And Kay had laughed-'Look here, let's talk of something else!'-but also, what was rare for her, had blushed.

That blush was all the link there was, between Helen and Julia-a funny sort of link, when you thought about it…

Julia smiled and tilted her head. They were only fifty yards or so from the entrance to Marylebone Station, and through a lull in the traffic there had come a sudden burst of noise from one of the platforms: a blown whistle, followed by the letting out of steam. She opened her eyes. 'I like that sound.'

'So do I,' said Helen. 'It's a holiday sound, isn't it? A buckets-and-spades sort of sound. It makes me long to get away-get out of London, just for a bit.' She swilled the tea in the bottom of her cup. 'No chance of that, I suppose.'

'No?' said Julia, looking at her. 'Can't you fix something up?'

'Where's there to go to? And then, the trains… And, anyway, I'd never persuade Kay. She's working extra shifts, now, at Dolphin Square. She'd never take time off, while things are so bad.'

Julia drew on her cigarette, then threw it down and covered it over with her shoe. 'Kay's such a heroine, though, isn't she?' she said, blowing out smoke. 'Kay's such a brick.'

She meant it jokingly, Helen supposed; but her tone was not quite light, and she looked at Helen, as she said it, from the corner of her eye, almost slyly-as if testing her, weighing up her response.

Helen remembered, then, something she'd once heard Mickey say about Julia: that she longed to be admired; that she couldn't bear to have anyone liked over herself; and that she was hard. And she thought, with a flicker of dislike,
It's true, you
are
hard
. She felt suddenly, in that one moment, exposed, unsafe.

But the queer thing was, the sensation of unsafeness, even of dislike, was almost exciting. She glanced again at Julia's smooth, handsome, upper-class face and thought of jewels, of pearls. Wasn't hardness a condition of glamour, after all?

And then Julia changed her pose, and the moment passed. She caught hold of her wristwatch again; Helen saw how late it was and said, 'Damn.' She quickly finished her cigarette, dropped the stub into her almost empty cup, and heard it hiss. 'I must get back to work.'

Julia nodded, drinking off her tea. She said, 'I'll go with you.'

They went quickly back to the canteen, to leave their cups on the counter; then walked the couple of hundred yards to Helen's office.

'Will your Miss Prism give you hell, for staying out so long?' asked Julia, as they went.

'Miss Chisholm,' said Helen, smiling. 'She might.'

'You'd better put the blame on me, then. Say I'm an emergency case. That I've- What? Lost my house, and everything in it?'

'Everything?' Helen thought it over. 'That's about six separate departments, I'm afraid. I could only help you with a grant for light repairs. You'd have to see someone over at the War Damage Commisson about rebuilding work; they're just as likely, however, to send you back to us. Miss Links, on the third floor, might be able to give you some assistance with the cleaning of any salvageable items-curtains, carpets, things like that. But be sure to bring your cleaners' bills with you; and the chit we gave you, when you first filed your report of the incident.-What's that? You've lost the chit? Oh, dear. You must get another, and start all over again… It's like snakes and ladders, you see. And this is always assuming, of course, that we've found time to see you in the first place.'

Julia grimaced. 'You enjoy your job.'

'It's frustrating, that's all. You hope to make some sort of difference. But now the people we rehoused three years ago are coming back; they've been bombed out all over again. We've less money than ever. And still the war is costing us-how much do they say? Eleven million a day?'

'Don't ask me,' said Julia. 'I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.'

'I wish I could,' said Helen. 'But I find I feel even worse, not knowing, than I do when I know it all…'