The Night Watch (53 page)

She finished dressing. Julia moved around the room, putting things away. Now and then they caught each other's eye, and smiled; if they moved close to one another, they reached out their hands, automatically, and lightly touched, or drily kissed.

Outside, over London, bombs were still falling. Helen had forgotten all about them. But when Julia went back through the curtained doorway and left her alone for a moment, she moved softly to the window and looked out, through one of the cracks in the talc, at the square. She could see houses, still silvered with moonlight; and as she watched, the sky was lit by a series of lurid sparkles and flares. The booms produced by the explosions started a second later: she felt the slight vibration of them in the board against her brow.

At every one of them, she flinched. All her confidence seemed to have left her. She began to shake-as if she'd lost the habit, the trick, of being at war; as if she knew, suddenly, only menace, the certainty of danger, the sureness of harm.

'God!' said Fraser. 'That was close, wasn't it?'

The bombs, and the anti-aircraft fire, had woken them all up. A few men were standing at their windows, calling encouragement to the British pilots and the ack-ack guns; Giggs, as usual, was yelling at the Germans. '
This way, Fritz!
' It was a kind of pandaemonium, really. Fraser had lain very rigidly for fifteen minutes, swearing at the noise; finally, unable to bear it, he'd got out of bed. He'd pulled the table across the cell and was standing on it in his socks, trying to see out of the window. Every time another blast came he flinched away from the panes of glass, sometimes covering his head; but he always moved back to them. It was better, he said, than doing nothing.

Duncan was still in his bunk. He was lying on his back, more or less comfortably, with his hands behind his head. He said, 'They sound closer than they are.'

'They don't disturb you?' asked Fraser incredulously.

'You get used to it.'

'It doesn't trouble you, that a bloody great bomb might be heading straight for you and you can't so much as duck your head?'

The cell was lit up by the moonlight, weirdly bright. Fraser's face showed clearly, but his boyish blue eyes, the blond of his hair, and the brown of the blanket across his shoulders, had lost their colours; they were all versions of silvery grey, like things in a photograph.

'They say if it's got your name on,' said Duncan, 'it'll get you wherever you are.'

Fraser snorted. 'That's the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from someone like Giggs. Except that when he says it, I really think he might imagine there's a factory somewhere on the outskirts of Berlin, stamping
Giggs, R, Wormwood Scrubs, England
into the casing.'

'All I mean,' said Duncan, 'is, if it's going to get us at all, it might as well get us here.'

Fraser put his face back to the window. 'I'd like to think I had a shot at improving my chances, that's all.-Oh, bugger!' He jumped, as another explosion sounded, rattling the glass, dislodging stones or mortar in the duct behind the heating grille in the wall. There came cries-whoops and cheers-from other cells; but someone called, too, in a high broken voice, '
Turn it off, you cunts!
' And after that, just for a moment, there was silence.

Then the ack-ack guns started up again, and more bombs fell.

Duncan looked up. 'You'll get your face blown off,' he said. 'Can you even see anything?'

'I can see the searchlights,' said Fraser. 'They're making their usual bloody muck of things… I can see the glow of fires. Christ knows where they are. For all we know, the whole damn city could be burning to the ground.' He started biting at one of his fingernails. 'My eldest brother's a warden,' he said, 'in Islington.'

'Go back to bed,' said Duncan, after another minute. 'There's nothing you can do.'

'That's what makes it so bloody! And to think of those damn twirls, down there in their shelter- What do you think they're doing right now? I bet they're playing cards and drinking whisky; and rubbing their blasted hands together in glee.'

'Mr Mundy won't be doing that,' said Duncan loyally.

Fraser laughed. 'You're right. He'll be sitting in the corner with a Christian Science tract, imagining the bombs away. Maybe I should take a tip from him. What do you say? He's persuaded you with all that nonsense, hasn't he? Is that why you're so untroubled?' He drew in his breath, and closed his eyes. When he spoke again, he spoke in a voice of unnatural calmness. '
There are no bombs
.
The bombs are not real
.
There is no war
.
The bombing of Portsmouth, Pisa, Cologne-that was nothing but a mass hallucination
.
Those people did not die, they only made a little mistake in thinking they did, it could happen to anyone
.
There is no war
…'

He opened his eyes. The night was suddenly silent again. He whispered, 'Has that done the trick?' Then he jumped about a foot, as another explosion came. 'Fuck! Not quite. Try harder, Fraser. You're not trying hard enough, damn you!' He pressed his hands to his temples and began to recite again, more softly. '
There are no bombs
.
There are no fires
.
There are no bombs
.
There are no fires
…'

At last he drew his blanket tighter across his shoulders, got down from the table and, still muttering, began to pace back and forth across the cell. With every fresh explosion, he swore and walked on faster. At last Duncan lifted his head from his pillow to say irritably, 'Stop walking about, can't you?'

'I'm sorry,' said Fraser, exaggeratedly polite, 'am I keeping you awake?' He got back on the table. 'It's this wretched moon brings them,' he said, as if to himself. 'Why can't there be clouds?' He rubbed the glass where his breath had misted it. For a minute he said nothing. Then he started up again: '
There are no bombs
.
There are no fires
.
There is no poverty and no injustice
.
There is no piss-pot in my cell
-'

'Shut up,' said Duncan. 'You shouldn't make fun of it. It- Well, it isn't fair on Mr Mundy.'

Fraser laughed outright at that. 'Mr Mundy,' he repeated. 'Not fair on Mr Mundy. What's it to you, if I make fun of old Mr Mundy?' He said this as if still to himself; but then seemed struck by the idea, and turned his head, and asked Duncan properly. 'Just what sort of a racket do you have going on with Mr Mundy, anyway?'

Duncan didn't answer. Fraser waited, then went on, 'You know what I'm talking about. Did you think I hadn't noticed? He gives you cigarettes, doesn't he? He gives you sugar for your cocoa, things like that.'

'Mr Mundy's kind,' said Duncan. 'He's the only kind twirl here, you can ask anyone.'

'But I'm asking you,' persisted Fraser. 'He doesn't give
me
cigarettes and sugar, after all.'

'He doesn't feel sorry for you, I suppose.'

'Does he feel sorry for you, then? Is that what it is?'

Duncan lifted his head. He'd begun picking at a length of wool that had come loose at the edge of his blanket. 'I expect so,' he said. 'People do, that's all. It's a thing of mine. It's always been like that, even before.-Before all this, I mean.'

'You've just one of those faces,' said Fraser.

'I suppose so.'

'The fascination of your eyelashes, something like that.'

Duncan let the blanket fall. 'I can't help my eyelashes!' he said, stupidly.

Fraser laughed, and his manner changed again. 'Indeed you can't, Pearce.' He got down from the table again and sat on the chair-moving the chair so that it was close to the wall, and spreading his knees, putting back his head. 'I once knew a girl,' he began, 'with eyelashes like yours-'

'Known lots of girls, haven't you?'

'Well, I don't like to boast.'

'Don't, then.'

'I say, look here, it was you who brought the subject up! I was asking about you and Mr Mundy… I was wondering if it really was just for the sake of your beautiful eyelashes that he gives you such a soft time of it.'

Duncan sat up. He'd remembered the feel of Mr Mundy's hand on his knee, and started to blush. He said hotly, 'I don't give him anything back, if that's what you mean!'

'Well, I suppose that is what I meant.'

'Is that how it works, with you and your girls?'

'Ouch. All right. I just-'

'Just what?'

Fraser hesitated again. Then, 'Just nothing,' he said. 'I was curious, that's all, about how these things go.'

'How what things go?'

'For someone like you.'

'Like me?' asked Duncan. 'What do you mean?'

Fraser moved, turned away: impatient, or simply embarassed. 'You know very well what I mean.'

'I don't.'

'You must know, at least, what gets said about you in here.'

Duncan felt himself blush harder. 'That gets said, in here, about anyone. Anyone with any kind of-of culture; who likes books, likes music. Who isn't a brute, in other words. But the fact is, it's the brutes who are worst of all at that sort of thing-'

'I know that,' said Fraser quietly. 'It isn't only that.'

'What is it, then?'

'Nothing. Something I heard, about why you're here.'

'What did you hear?'

'That you're here because- Look, forget it, it's none of my business.'

'No,' said Duncan. 'Tell me what you heard.'

Fraser smoothed back his hair. 'That you're here,' he said bluntly at last, 'because your boyfriend died, and you tried to kill yourself over it.'

Duncan lay very still, unable to answer.

'I'm sorry,' said Fraser. 'As I said, it's none of my damn business. I don't care a fig why you're here, or who you used to go around with. I think the laws about suicide are bloody, if you want to know-'

'Who told you that?' asked Duncan thickly.

'It doesn't matter. Forget it.'

'Was it Wainwright? Or Binns?'

'No.'

'Who was it, then?'

Fraser looked away. 'It was that little queer Stella, of course.'

'
Her!
' said Duncan. 'She makes me sick. They all do, all that crowd. They don't want to go to bed with girls, but they make themselves like girls. They make themselves worse than girls! They need doctors! I hate them.'

'All right,' said Fraser mildly. 'So do I.'

'You think I'm like them!'

'That's not what I said.'

'You think I used to be like them; or that Alec was-'

He stopped. He had never said Alec's name here, aloud, to anyone but Mr Mundy; and now he'd spat it out as if it were a curse.

Fraser was watching him through the gloom. 'Alec,' he said, carefully. 'Was that- Was that your boyfriend?'

'He wasn't my boyfriend!' said Duncan. Why did everybody have to think of it like that? 'He was only my friend. Don't you have friends? Doesn't everyone?'

'Of course. I'm sorry.'

'He was only my friend. If you'd grown up where I grew up, feeling like me, you'd know what that meant.'

'Yes. I expect so…'

The worst of the bombing seemed, for the moment, to have passed on. Fraser blew into his hands, worked his fingers, to get the cold out. Then he got up, reached under his pillow and brought out cigarettes. Almost shyly, he offered one to Duncan. Duncan shook his head.

But Fraser kept the cigarettes held out. 'I should like you to,' he said quietly. 'Go on. Please.'

'It'll be one less for you.'

'I don't care… Better let me light it, though.'

He put two cigarettes to his mouth, then took up the pot that he and Duncan kept their dinner-salt in, and a needle. You could make a flame, by sparking the metal against the stone: it took him a moment or two, but at last the paper caught and the tobacco started to glow. The cigarette he handed over was damp from his lips: collapsed, like a sucked-on straw. A strand or two of tobacco came loose upon Duncan's tongue.

They smoked without speaking. The cigarettes only lasted a minute. And when Fraser's was finished he opened it up, to keep what he could for the next one…

As he did it he said quietly, 'I envy you your friend, Pearce. Truly I do. I don't think I've ever cared so much for a man-or a woman either, come to that-as much as you must have cared for him… Yes, I envy you.'

'You're the only one who does, then,' said Duncan moodily. 'My own father's ashamed of me.'

'Well, so is mine of me, if it comes to that. He thinks my sort ought to be handed over to Germany, since we're all so keen on helping the Nazis along. A man ought to be a source of embarassment to his father, don't you think? If I ever have a son, I hope he makes my life hell. How, otherwise, will there ever be any progress?'

But Duncan wouldn't smile. 'You make a joke of things,' he said. 'It's different for people like you, for people in your world.'

'Have things really been so bad for you?'

'I dare say they wouldn't seem bad, to someone looking in from outside. My father never- He never hit me, or anything like that. It was just-' He struggled, searching for the words. 'I don't know. It was liking things you weren't supposed to like; and feeling things you weren't supposed to feel. Never being able to say the thing that people expected. And Alec felt like I did. He hated the war. His brother had died, right at the start of it, and his father kept on at him to go and fight… And it was the blitz. It was nearly the end of the blitz, though we didn't know that then. It felt like-like the end of the bloody world! It was the worst time for everything. Alec and I never wanted to fight. He wanted to make a difference, to how people felt. Instead- Well-'

'Poor chap,' said Fraser feelingly, when Duncan wouldn't go on. 'He sounds all right. I'd like to have known him.'

'He
was
all right,' said Duncan. 'He was clever. Not like me. People have always said I'm clever, but that's only because I make myself talk in a certain way. But he was funny. He could never be still. He was always on to something new. He was a bit like you, I suppose; or you're like he would have been, if he'd been to a proper school, had money… He made things seem exciting. He made things-I don't know; he made them seem better than they really were. Even if afterwards, when you thought about it, you realised that some of what he'd said was silly; at the time, when you were with him, you wanted to go along with it. You felt-swept along by him.'