The Night Watch (34 page)

She picked up her satchel and led the way along a passage into the kitchen. There was an old deal table in the middle of the room, thick with fallen flakes of plaster; she began to clear the plaster off.

'I really do have rabbit-meat sandwiches, by the way,' she said, as the plaster tumbled. 'One of my neighbours has a gardener, who traps them. Apparently they're all over London now. He said he caught this one in Leicester Square! I'm not sure I believe him.'

Helen said, 'A friend of mine who firewatches says she saw a rabbit, one night, on the platform at Victoria Station; so perhaps he did.'

'A rabbit at Victoria! Was it waiting for a train?'

'Yes. Apparently it was looking at its pocket-watch, and seemed awfully het-up about something.'

Julia laughed. The laughter was different to the sort of laughter Helen had heard from her before. It was real, unforced-like water welling briefly from a spring, and to have called it up made Helen feel pleased as a child. She said to herself,
For goodness' sake!You're like a second-former blushing over a prefect!
She had to move about to hide her feelings-looking across the dusty jars and pudding moulds on the kitchen shelves while Julia set her bag on the table and rummaged inside it.

The kitchen was an old Victorian one, with long wooden counters and a chipped stone sink. The window had bars before it, like the other, and in between the bars curled ivy. The light was green and very soft. Helen said, as she walked about, 'You can see the cook and the scullery maids in here.'

'Yes, can't you?'

'And the local policeman, slipping in in the middle of his beat, for his cup of tea.'

'“No Followers”,' said Julia, smiling… 'Come and sit down, Helen.'

She had got out a wax-paper packet of sandwiches, and a nightwatchman's bottle of tea. She'd drawn up chairs-but looked dubiously from the dusty seats to Helen's smartish coat. She said, 'I could put paper down, if you like.'

'It's all right,' said Helen. 'Really.'

'Sure? I'll take you at your word, you know. I won't be like Kay about it.'

'Like Kay?'

'Laying down my cloak, all of that, like Walter Raleigh.'

It was the first time they had mentioned Kay, and Helen sat without answering. For Kay
would
have made a fuss about the dust, she thought; and she knew instinctively how tiresome that sort of thing would seem to Julia. It made her aware, more than ever, of the curious situation she was in: that she had accepted a love, a set of attentions, that Julia herself had had the chance to accept first, and had rejected…

Julia unwrapped the sandwiches, drew out the cork from the steaming tea; she'd had the bottle wrapped in a pullover, she said, to keep it hot. She poured a little of the tea into two dainty porcelain cups from one of the cupboards; then swilled it around, to warm the china, threw that away and poured out more.

The tea was sugary, and very creamy. It must have had all Julia's ration in it. Helen sipped it, closing her eyes, feeling guilty. When Julia offered her a sandwich she said, 'I ought to give you money or something for this, Julia.'

Julia said, 'Really.'

'I could give you a coupon-'

'For God's sake! Is that what this war has done to us? You can buy me a drink some time, if you feel as badly about it as all that.'

They began to eat. The bread was coarse, but the meat sweet and very tender; the flavour was a heavy, distinctive one-Helen realised, after a moment, that it must be garlic. She had tasted garlic in restaurants, but had never cooked with it herself; Julia had bought it, she said as they ate, from a shop on Frith Street, Soho. She'd managed, too, to get macaroni, olive oil, dried parmesan cheese. And she had a relative in America who sent her parcels of food. 'You can get more Italian food in Chicago,' she said, swallowing, 'than you can in Italy. Joyce sends me olives, and black salad vinegar-'

'How lucky you are!' said Helen.

'I suppose I am. You don't have any people abroad who could do something like that for you?'

'Oh, no. My family are all still in Worthing, where I grew up.'

Julia looked surprised. 'You grew up in Worthing? I didn't know that. Though I suppose, now I think about it, you had to grow up somewhere… My family has a house near Arundel, we used to swim at Worthing sometimes. Once I ate too many whelks or cockles-or toffee apples, or something-and was vilely sick, all over the pier. What was it like there, growing up?'

'It was all right,' said Helen. 'My family- Well, they're very ordinary. Did you know that? They're not- They're not like Kay's.'
They're not like yours
, was what she really meant. 'My father's an optician. My brother makes lenses for the RAF. My parents' house-' She looked around. 'It isn't like this house, it isn't anything like this.'

Perhaps Julia saw that she was embarassed. She said quietly, 'Well, but nothing like that matters any more, does it? Not these days. Not now we all dress like scarecrows, and talk like Americans-or else, like chars. “Here's your grub, ducks,” a girl in a café said to me the other day; I swear she'd been to Roedean, too…'

Helen smiled. 'It makes people feel better, I suppose. It's another kind of uniform.'

Julia made a face. 'I hate this passion for uniforms, too. Uniforms, armbands, badges.-I thought the military impulse, as it's grown up in Germany, was what we were against!' She sipped her tea, then almost yawned. 'But perhaps I take the whole thing too seriously…' She looked at Helen over the rim of her cup. 'I ought to be like you. Well-adjusted, and so on.'

Helen stared-amazed to think that Julia had formed any sort of opinion of her, much less one like that. She said, 'Is that how I seem? It isn't how I feel.
Well-adjusted
. I'm not even sure I know what it means.'

'Well,' said Julia, 'you always give the impression of being pretty thoughtful, pretty measured. That's what I mean. You don't say much; but what you do say seems to be worth listening to. That's quite rare, isn't it?'

'It must be a trick,' said Helen lightly. 'When you're quiet, people imagine you're awfully deep. In fact all you're doing is thinking-I don't know-how tight your bra is; or wondering whether or not you need the lavatory.'

'But that,' said Julia, 'sounds exactly like good adjustment, to me! Thinking about yourself, rather than the effect you might be having on other people. And the whole-' She hesitated. 'Well, the whole grisly “L” business. You know what I mean… You seem to handle
that
awfully coolly.'

Helen looked down into her cup, and didn't answer. Julia said, more quietly, 'How impertinent of me. I'm sorry, Helen.'

'No, it's all right,' said Helen quickly, looking up again. 'I'm not very used to talking about it, that's all. And I'm not sure, you know, that I've ever really thought of it as being much of a
business
. It was just how things turned out… I didn't think about it at all, to tell you the truth, when I was younger. Or if I did, I suppose I thought the usual sort of thing: spinster teachers, earnest girls…'

'There was no-one, in Worthing?'

'Well, there were men.' Helen laughed. 'That makes me sound like a call-girl, doesn't it? There was only one boy, really. I moved to London to be near him; but it didn't work out… And, then I met Kay.'

'Ah, yes,' said Julia, sipping her tea again. 'And then you met Kay. And in such terribly romantic circumstances.'

Helen looked at her, trying to gauge her tone and expression. She said shyly, 'It did seem romantic. Kay's rather glamorous, isn't she? At least, she seemed glamorous to me. I'd never met anyone like her before. I'd been in London less than six months then. She made such a-such a fuss of me. And she seemed so certain of what she wanted. That was terribly exciting somehow. It was hard to resist, anyway. It never felt strange, as perhaps it ought to have done… But then, so many impossible things were becoming ordinary, just then.' She thought back, with a slight shudder, to the night that she and Kay had met. 'And as impossible things go, being with Kay was, I suppose, quite a mild one…'

She was speaking, she realised, in almost a tone of apology; for she was conscious, still, of what she thought of as a gaucheness in herself-conscious that all the things she was describing to Julia as attractive in Kay were things that Julia herself must have found it easy to resist… Part of her wanted to defend Kay; part of her was simply embarassed. But part of her, too, wanted to confide in Julia, almost as one wife to another. She'd never spoken like this to anyone. She'd left her own friends behind, when she moved in with Kay; or she kept Kay a secret from them. And Kay's friends were all like Mickey-all like Kay, in other words… Now she wanted to ask how it had been for Julia, with Kay. She wanted to know if Julia had felt what she herself sometimes, guiltily, felt: that Kay's constant fussing, which had once been so appealing, so exciting, could also be rather like a burden; that Kay made an absurd kind of heroine of you; that Kay's passion was so great there was something unreal about it, it could never be matched…

But she didn't ask any of these things. She looked down into her cup again, and was silent. Julia said, 'And, when the war's over? And everything goes back to normal?'-and she took refuge, then, in briskness. She shook her head.

'It's pointless thinking about that, isn't it?' It was what everybody said, to all sorts of questions. 'We might get blown to bits tomorrow. Until then-well, I'd never want to advertise it. I'd never dream, for example, of telling my mother! But, why should I? It's a thing between Kay and me. And we're two grown women. Who does it harm?'

Julia watched her for a moment, then poured more tea from the bottle. She said, as if with a touch of sarcasm, 'You
are
well-adjusted.'

So then Helen grew embarassed again. She thought,
I've said too much, and bored her
.
She preferred me before, when I was quiet and she thought I was deep
…

They sat without speaking, until Julia shivered and rubbed her arms. 'God!' she said. 'This isn't much fun for you, is it? Me, giving you the third degree, in the basement of a ruined house! It's like lunch with the Gestapo!'

Helen laughed, her embarassment fading. 'No. It's nice.'

'Are you sure? I could- Well, I could show you over the whole place, if you like.'

'Yes, I'd like that.'

They finished their sandwiches and their tea, and Julia tidied away the bottle and the paper and rinsed out the cups. They went back upstairs, going past the doors to the sitting-room and the room behind it, and up the dimly-lit staircase to the floors above.

They went softly, sometimes murmuring together over some particular detail or piece of damage, but more often moving about in silence. The rooms on these higher floors were bleaker, even, than the ones downstairs. The bedrooms still had their beds and wardrobes in them, and the wardrobes were damp, because of the broken windows, the ancient clothes inside them eaten through by moths or growing mouldy. Sections of the ceilings had come down. Books and ornaments lay about, ruined. And in the bathroom, a mirror hung on the wall with a weird, blank face: its glass had shattered and fallen, and filled the basin beneath it in a hundred silvery shards.

As they climbed up to the attic floor there was a scuttling, fluttering sound. Julia turned. 'Pigeons, or mice,' she said softly. 'You won't mind?'

'Not rats?' asked Helen apprehensively.

'Oh, no. At least, I don't think so.'

She went on, and opened a door. The scuttling changed, became the sound of clapping hands. Peering over Julia's shoulder, Helen saw a bird fly up and then, as if by magic, disappear. The sloping ceiling had a hole in it, where an incendiary had burned through. The rocket had landed on a feather mattress underneath and made a crater: it looked like an ulcerated leg. You could still smell the bitter smell of burnt, damp feathers.

The room was a housekeeper's or maid's. There was a photograph in a frame, on the bedside table, of a little girl. And on the floor was a single slim leather glove, much nibbled by mice.

Helen picked the glove up and did her best to smooth it out. She put it neatly down beside the photograph. She stood for a second looking up through the hole in the ceiling at the close, gun-coloured sky. Then she went with Julia to the window, and gazed out at the yard at the back of the house.

The yard was ruined, like everything else: its paving-stones broken, its plants run wild, the column of a sundial blown from its base and lying in pieces.

'Isn't it sad?' said Julia quietly. 'Look at the fig tree.'

'Yes. All that fruit!' For the tree was lolling with broken branches, and the ground beneath it was thick with rotting figs that must have fallen from it and gone uncollected the summer before.

Helen got out cigarettes, and Julia moved closer to her, to take one. They smoked together, their shoulders just touching, the sleeve of Julia's jacket just catching at Helen's coat as she raised and lowered her cigarette. Her knuckles were still marked, Helen noticed, from where she'd grazed them the week before; and Helen thought of how, that time, she'd lightly touched them with her fingertips. She and Julia had only been standing together-just standing together, like this. Nothing had happened to make a change. But she couldn't imagine, now, touching any part of Julia so carelessly as that.

The thought was thrilling, but also frightening. They chatted a little, about the houses which backed on to Bryanston Square; Julia pointed out the ones she had visited, and described the things she'd seen in them. But her sleeve still caught against Helen's, and it was that brushing and clinging of fabric, rather than Julia's words, which held Helen's attention; at last she began to feel the flesh of her arm rising up-as if Julia, or the nearness of Julia, was somehow tugging, drawing at it…

She shivered and moved away. She'd almost finished her cigarette, and made that the excuse. She looked around for somewhere to stub it.

Julia saw. 'Just drop it, and stamp on it,' she said.

'I don't like to,' said Helen.