The Night Watch (48 page)

Kay kissed her head, stroked back her hair. She said, in a murmur, 'I suppose you're awfully sleepy, darling?'

'I am, rather.'

'Too sleepy to kiss?'

Helen didn't answer. Kay drew free her arm. She caught hold of the collar of Helen's nightgown and, very gently, pulled it down. She put her lips to the bend of Helen's neck, moved her mouth against the hot, smooth flesh. But she became aware, as she was doing it, of the feel of the threadbare fabric in her hand. She lifted her head from her pillow and said, in surprise, 'You're not wearing your new pyjamas?'

'Hmm?' said Helen, as if from the edge of sleep.

'Your pyjamas,' said Kay softly.

'Oh,' said Helen, reaching for Kay's hand again; drawing Kay's arm about her and pulling her close. 'I forgot,' she said.

5

The moon was so full and so bright that night, they didn't need their torches. Surfaces were lit up, white against black. Everything looked depthless, the fronts of houses flat as scenery on a stage, the trees like trees of papier maché touched up with glitter and silver paint… Nobody liked it. It made you feel vulnerable, exposed. People got off the train and turned up the collars of their coats, put down their heads, darted away to darker places. A hundred yards from Cricklewood Station, the streets were silent. Only Reggie and Viv, uncertain of their route, went slowly. When Reggie took out a piece of paper to check the directions on it, Viv looked fearfully up at the sky: the paper shone in his hand as if luminous.

The house, when they found it at last, was an ordinary one; but there was a name-plate screwed to the door-frame, beneath the bell. The plate looked solid, professional-reassuring, but frightening too. Viv had her arm through Reggie's and now slightly pulled him back. He caught hold of her hand and squeezed her fingers. Her fingers felt odd, because he'd got her a gold-coloured ring, that was slightly too large and kept slipping.

'All right?' he asked her. His voice was thin. He hated doctors, hospitals, things like that. She knew he wished she had come with Betty, her sister-anyone but him.

So it was she who pressed the bell. The man-Mr Imrie-came to answer it almost at once.

'Ah yes,' he said, quite loudly, looking past them into the street. 'Come in, come in.' They stood close together in the darkness, unsure of the size of the hall, while he closed the door and rearranged the black-out across its panels of frosted glass; then he led them into his waiting-room, where the light was bright and made them blink. The room smelt sweet: of polish, of rubber, of gas. There were pictures on the walls, showing teeth, pink gums; a case had a plaster model inside it of a single great molar, a slice removed to expose the enamel, the pulp and red nerve. The colours were livid, because of the light. Viv looked from one thing to another and felt her teeth begin to ache.

Mr Imrie was a dentist; and did this other thing on the side.

'Do sit down,' he said.

He took up a sheet of paper and clipped it to a board. He wore spectacles with heavy frames and, in order to see the page before him, he pushed them up, so that they gripped his brow like a pair of goggles on a band. He asked for Viv's name. She'd taken off her gloves to expose the ring, and now, with a little flush of self-consciousness, gave the name that she and Reggie had agreed on:
Mrs Margaret Harrison
. He said it aloud, as he wrote it down; and then he kept saying it at the start of every question: 'And now, Mrs Harrison', 'Well, Mrs Harrison'-until the name, Viv thought, sounded so false and made-up, it might have been an actress's name, or the name of a character in a film.

The questions were simple enough at first. When they grew more personal, Mr Imrie suggested that Reggie might like to wait in the hall. Viv thought he went out pretty quickly, as if in relief. She heard the slither of his shoes on the lino as he paced up and down.

Perhaps Mr Imrie heard it too. He lowered his voice. 'The date of your last period?'

Viv gave it. He made a note of it, and seemed to frown.

'Any children?' he asked her then. 'Miscarriages? You know what a miscarriage is? Of course… And have you ever before been obliged to receive the, er, treatment that you've come to receive from me?'

She said 'No' to it all; but told him, after a little hesitation, about the pills, in case they made some sort of difference.

He shook his head, dismissively, as she described them. 'It's never worth bothering, if you'll take my advice,' he said, 'with that sort of thing. Probably gave you a tummy upset, did they? Yes, I thought they would have.' He drew down his spectacles; and was left with a phantom pair, marked out in lines of red, on the flesh of his brow.

He produced a case of instruments, and Viv flinched, growing frightened. He wanted only, however, to test her blood-pressure and listen to her chest; and he made her stand and loosen her skirt, and felt her stomach-felt all about it, pressing hard with his fingers and palms.

Then he straightened, and wiped his hands. 'Well,' he said gravely, 'you're a little further along than I should have liked.' He was dating it, of course, from her last period. 'I usually recommend this treatment for pregnancies of up to ten weeks, and yours is rather past that.'

The extra weeks made a difference, apparently. He went to the door and called for Reggie and explained to them both that, because of the added element of risk, he would have to charge them more than the standard fee. 'A further ten pounds, I'm afraid.'

'Ten pounds?' said Reggie, appalled.

Mr Imrie spread his hands. 'You'll understand, with the law as it is… The risk I'm running is very grave.'

'My friend said seventy-five. Seventy-five's all I've brought.'

'Seventy-five would have seen to it, a month ago. I dare say seventy-five would see to it even now, were you to go to another sort of man. I'm not that sort of man, however… I'm thinking of your wife's health. I'm thinking of my own wife… I am sorry.'

Reggie shook his head. 'This is a rum kind of way to do business,' he said bitterly, 'if you don't mind my saying so. One price one month, and another the next. What difference does it make to you, it being in there'-he nodded in the general direction of Viv's stomach-'two or three weeks longer?'

Mr Imrie smiled, as if with tremendous patience. 'It makes a great deal of difference, I'm afraid.'

'Well, that's what you say. You'd say the same thing, I suppose, to a chap who'd come to you with a case of-of an ingrowing tooth?'

'I very well might.'

'You would, would you-?'

The argument ran on. Viv stood and said nothing, hating it all, hating Reggie, gazing at the floor. At last Mr Imrie agreed to take the extra ten pounds in the form of clothing coupons: Reggie turned his back and brought out a little stash of them, pressed them into the envelope in which he'd already put the money, and handed them over. He made a snorting noise as he did it.

'Thank you,' said Mr Imrie, with exaggerated politeness. He stowed the envelope away in a pocket of his own. 'Now, if you wouldn't mind making yourself comfortable here, just for twenty minutes or so, I'll take your wife next door.'

'Keep my coat and hat, will you?' said Viv to Reggie, coldly. He took them, and reached after her fingers.

'It'll be all right,' he said, trying to catch her eye. 'It'll be OK.'

She pulled her fingers away. A clock on the wall showed five past eight. Mr Imrie led her back across the hall and into his surgery.

She thought at first he meant to take her through this room into another. She thought he would have some quite different place set up. But he closed the door behind her and went to a counter, looking busy; and for an awful moment, then, she imagined he meant to do the operation with her sitting in his dentist's chair… Then she saw, beyond the chair, a couch, on trestle legs, covered over with a wax-paper sheet, and with a little zinc pail beside it. It looked horrible with the great steel light shining on it, and the trays of instruments all around, the queer machines, the drills, the bottles of gas. She felt the suffocated rising of tears in her chest and throat, and thought, for the first time,
I can't!

'Now then, Mrs Harrison,' said Mr Imrie, perhaps seeing her hesitate. 'Just slip off your skirt, your shoes and underthings, and hop up onto the couch, and we'll make a start. All right? There's nothing to worry about. A very straightforward procedure indeed.'

He turned away, took off his jacket and washed his hands; began to fold back his sleeves. There was an electric fire burning, and she stood in front of it to undress; she put her clothes on a chair, and got quickly onto the crackling wax-paper before he should turn-for she felt more exposed and embarassed, somehow, with only her bottom half bare, than she would have felt if she had stripped completely. It was like something a tart would do… But when she lay on the hard flat couch, she felt foolish in another way-like a fish, with gaping gills and mouth, on a fishmonger's slab.

'Let me give you a pillow,' said Mr Imrie, coming over and carefully not looking at her naked hips. 'And now, if you'd care to raise yourself?' He slid a folded towel under her bottom-moving her blouse, as he did it, a little higher up her back, and saying, 'We don't want this to spoil, do we?'

She realised he was tucking it out of the way of any blood that might come; and grew frightened again. She had no idea how much blood
would
come-had only, in fact, the haziest notion of what he was about to do to her. He had not explained it; and it seemed too late, now, to ask. She didn't want to speak at all, with her lower half all exposed to his gaze like this; she was too embarassed. She closed her eyes.

When she felt him lift and try to part her knees, she grew more self-conscious than ever. 'Lie a little less rigidly, if you can, Mrs Harrison,' he said. And then: 'Mrs Harrison? A little less rigid?' She opened her legs, and after a second felt something warm and dry come between them and begin to probe. It was his finger. He pushed firmly into her, and with his other hand pressed again at her stomach, harder than before. She gave a little gasp. He pushed and pressed on, until she couldn't help but draw her hips away. He moved back, and wiped his hands on a towel.

'You must expect, of course,' he said, in a mild and matter-of-fact kind of way, 'a certain amount of discomfort. That can't be helped, I'm afraid.'

He turned away, then brought back a sponge, or a cloth, with some sharp-smelling liquid on it, with which he began to dab at her. She lifted her head and tried to see. She could only see his face: he had put up his spectacles again, and again they looked like goggles-like a welder's goggles, or a stonemason's… On a shelf, near his head, was a toy: a bear or a rabbit in a flowered dress and a hat. She imagined him waving it before frightened boys and girls. A notice, pinned to the wall behind him, gave
Information for Patients Regarding Stoppings and Extractions
.

When he placed the mask over her mouth, it was so like an ordinary respirator-so much less unpleasant, in fact, than a regular gas-mask-that she almost didn't mind it. Then she was aware of a sensation of slipping, and made a grab at the edge of the couch, to keep herself from tumbling off it… It seemed to her then that she must have fallen anyway, but had inexplicably landed on her feet; for she was suddenly standing in darkness in a crowd of people, being jostled on every side. She didn't know if she was in a street, some public place like that, or where she was. A siren was sounding, but it was strange to her, it meant nothing. She didn't know the person she was with, but she clutched at their arm. 'What's that?' she asked. 'That noise? What is it?' '
Don't you know?
' the person answered. '
That's the Warning for the Bull
.' 'The Bull?' she asked. '
The German Bull
,' said the voice. At once, then, she understood that the Bull was a new and very terrifying kind of weapon. She turned, in fright; but she turned in the wrong direction, or not in the proper way. '
Here it is!
' cried the voice in terror-and she tried to turn again, but was struck in the stomach and knew she'd been caught, in the darkness, by the horn of the terrible German Bull. She put out her hands and felt the shaft of it, smooth and hard and cold; she felt the place, even, where it entered her stomach; and she knew, too, that if she were to reach around to her back she would be able to feel the tip of it jutting out there, because the horn had run right through her…

Then she came back to herself, and to Mr Imrie; but she could still feel the horn. She thought it had pinned her to the couch. She heard her own voice, talking nonsense, and Mr Imrie giving a chuckle.

'Bulls? Oh, no. Not in Cricklewood, my dear.'

He held a bowl to her face, and she was sick.

He gave her a handkerchief to wipe her lips with, and helped her to sit upright. The towel had gone from beneath her hips. His sleeves were rolled back down, his cuffs neatly fastened, the links in place; his brow was flushed, with a faint sheen of perspiration on it. Everything-the smells of the room, the arrangement of things-seemed subtly different to her; she had a sense of time having given a sort of lurch, while her back was turned-as if she'd been playing at 'Grandmother's Footsteps'… On the floor there was a single shilling-sized spot of scarlet, but apart from that, nothing nasty to see. The zinc pail had been moved a little further away and covered over.

She swung her legs over the side of the couch, and the pain in her stomach and her back turned into a dragging internal ache; she became aware, too, of smaller, separate discomforts: a soreness between her legs, and a tenderness, as if she'd been kicked, in the flesh of her belly. Mr Imrie said that he'd put a wad of gauze inside her, to take up the blood; and he'd left, beside her on the couch, an ordinary sanitary towel and belt… Seeing that, she grew embarassed all over again, and tried too quickly to put on the belt and fasten the loops. He saw how she fumbled, and thought she was still dazed from the gas, and came and helped her.