by Sarah Waters
His manner had changed. He seemed really interested, yet was smiling, too, as if at some joke of his own. Helen grew cautious. It was just possible, she thought, that he was some kind of charming lunatic: one of those men—like Heath—driven insane by the mood of the times. She didn’t know whether or not to believe him about the door. Suppose he had forced it? She’d often thought how vulnerable she and Viv were, so close to Oxford Street and yet cut off, up here, from the bustle of the pavement.
‘I’m afraid I really can’t discuss it with you now,’ she said, her anxiety and impatience making her prim. ‘If you’d care to come back in ordinary hours, I’m sure my colleague’—she glanced involuntarily towards the stairs, the lavatory—‘will be happy to explain the whole procedure to you.’
But that seemed to pique his interest even more. ‘Your colleague,’ he said, as if seizing on the word, and following her gaze with his own; even lifting and weaving his head, and clicking his tongue against his lower lip, thoughtfully, as he did it. ‘I suppose your colleague’s not available right now, by any chance?’
‘I’m afraid we’re closed for lunch just now,’ said Helen firmly.
‘Yes, of course. You said that. What a pity.’ He said it vaguely. He was still gazing over at the stairs.
She turned a page in the diary. ‘If you could come back tomorrow at, say, four—’
But now he’d looked round, and realised what she was doing. His manner changed again. He almost laughed. ‘Look here, I’m sorry. I think I’ve given you the wrong impression.’
At that moment, Viv came up the stairs and into the office. She must have heard his voice after all, and wondered what was going on. She looked at him as if in amazement; and then, unaccountably, she blushed. Helen caught her eye, and made what she hoped was a little gesture of warning and alarm. She said, ‘I was just finding this gentleman an appointment. Apparently the door downstairs was open—’
The man, however, had stepped forward and begun to laugh. ‘Hello,’ he said, giving Viv a nod. Then he turned back to Helen. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said to her, in real apology, ‘I really did give you the wrong idea. It isn’t a wife I’m after, you see. Just Miss Pearce.’
Viv’s colour had deepened. She glanced at Helen as if nervous. She said, ‘This is Mr Robert Fraser, Helen, a friend of my brother’s. Mr Fraser, this is Miss Giniver…Is Duncan all right?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing like that,’ said the man easily. ‘Nothing at all. I was just passing, and thought I’d look in.’
‘Duncan asked you to come?’
‘I was just hoping you’d be free, to tell you the truth. It was just—Well, it was just a whim.’
He laughed again. There was a moment’s awkward silence. Helen thought of the little warning gesture she’d made to Viv a minute ago; and felt a fool. For everything had changed, suddenly. It was just as though someone had taken a piece of chalk and, swiftly but firmly, bent to the floor and drawn a line: a line that had Viv and this man, Robert Fraser, on one side, and herself on the other. She made a vague kind of movement. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I ought to get on.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said Viv quickly. Her eyelids fluttered. ‘I’ll—I’ll take Mr Fraser outside. Mr Fraser—?’
‘Of course,’ he said, moving with her towards the stairs. He nodded pleasantly to Helen as he went by. ‘Goodbye! I’m sorry to have disturbed you. If I ever change my mind about that wife, I’ll be sure to let you know!’
He went quickly down the staircase with a boyish irregular tread. When the door at the bottom was opened she heard him say to Viv, in a lower but carrying tone: ‘I’m afraid I’ve rather landed you in it—’
There was a thump, as the door was closed.
Helen kept still for a moment, then stepped into her office and got out her cigarettes; but threw the packet down, unopened. She felt more of a fool than ever, now. She recalled the way that, on first coming up the stairs from the lavatory, she’d almost screamed—like some comedy spinster in a play!
Just as she thought this she heard laughter, down in the street. She went to the window and looked out.
The window had had cheesecloth varnished to it at some point in the war; a few scraps of net and some scrapings of varnish remained stuck to the glass, distorting the view. But she could see clearly enough the top of Fraser’s head and his wide shoulders, lifting and tilting as he gestured and shrugged. And she could see, too, the curve of Viv’s pink cheek and the tip of her ear, the spread of her fingers on the sleeve of her folded arm.
She let her head sink, until her brow met the varnished glass. How easy it was, she thought unhappily, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt—they could kiss, make love, do anything at all—and the world indulged them. Whereas she and Julia—
She thought of what she’d been meaning to do, out on the fire-escape. I’m in love with Julia, she’d been going to say. And my love is almost killing me!
She couldn’t imagine saying it now. It seemed an absurd thing to say, now! She stood at the window, looking down, until she saw Fraser step forward to shake Viv’s hand, as if in farewell; then she moved quickly back to her desk and took up a folder of papers.
She heard the click of the latch being fastened on the street-door, and the sound of footsteps. Viv came slowly up the stairs and through the waiting-room. She stood in the doorway of Helen’s office. Helen didn’t raise her head. Viv was silent for a moment, then said awkwardly, ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for,’ said Helen, looking up at last and making herself smile. ‘He frightened the life out of me, though! Was the door really unlocked?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Well, then I suppose we can’t blame him for coming up.’
‘He just thought it would be all right to call in,’ said Viv. ‘I don’t know him at all, really. He turned up at my brother’s when I was there last week. We only talked for a little while. He knew my brother, ages ago. I don’t know why he should have come here.’
She’d started biting at one of her fingers, at the skin beside a nail. Her head was bowed, and her thick dark hair had slightly fallen across her face. Helen watched her for a second, then went back to picking through the papers in the folder.
At last Viv said, rather thinly, ‘Do you want to come back out, Helen?’
Helen looked up again. ‘Back outside? Do we have time?’ She looked at the clock. ‘Only ten minutes…I don’t know. Shall we?’
‘Well,’ said Viv, ‘not if you don’t want to.’
They gazed at each other, as if meaning to speak; but the moment for confidences had passed. Helen shuffled the papers. ‘I ought to look these over, I suppose,’ she said.
And, ‘Yes,’ said Viv, at once. ‘Yes, all right.’
She stood in Helen’s doorway a little longer, as if she might say more; then she went out to the waiting-room. Soon there came the sound of her straightening up the magazines on the table, shaking out the sofa cushions.
Everyone has their secrets, after all, Helen thought. The thought depressed her, horribly. It made her think of Julia. She put the papers down and sat at her desk, with her head in her hands, her eyes closed. If only Julia were here, right now! She began to long for the sound of Julia’s voice, for the comforting touch of her hand. What would she be doing, at this sort of hour? Helen tried to visualise her. She pressed her hands into the sockets of her eyes and sent her thoughts across the streets of Marylebone until she had a sense of Julia’s presence, fantastically vivid and real. She saw her sitting in her study at home: silent, solitary, perhaps bored or restless, perhaps thinking of Helen herself. She began to miss Julia so badly, the missing felt like an ache or a sickness. She opened her eyes, and saw the telephone. But she oughtn’t to call, in a mood like this. She wouldn’t do it, anyway, with Viv so close, able to overhear every word; and she couldn’t bring herself to go tiptoeing across the floor and silently close her office door.
&nbs
p; If Viv goes down to the lavatory, she thought, I’ll do it. Only then.
She sat tensely, listening as Viv brushed dust from the carpet and rearranged chairs. Then she heard heels on the staircase, fading. Viv must have taken the teapot down to the basin to rinse out the leaves.
At once, she picked up the telephone and dialled.
There was a tinny electric burr. She imagined the telephone on Julia’s desk, beginning to ring; imagined Julia giving a start, putting down her pen, lifting her hand—holding it, perhaps, for a moment or two, above the receiver, because of course everyone preferred to let a telephone ring a little than answer it at once. But the ringing went on. Perhaps Julia was downstairs in the kitchen; or down on the floor below that, in the lavatory. Now Helen saw her running up the narrow stairs to her study, in her flapping espadrille slippers; she saw her tucking back a lock of hair that had come bouncing out from behind her ear, reaching breathlessly for the phone…
Still the ringing went on. Maybe Julia, after all, had decided not to answer. Helen had known her do that, when she was in the middle of writing a scene. But if she guessed it was Helen calling, then surely she’d pick the receiver up? If Helen would only let the thing ring for long enough, Julia would realise, Julia would answer.
Burr, burr. Burr, burr. The hateful noise went on and on. At last, after almost a minute, Helen put the receiver down—unable to bear the image of the telephone shrieking, forlorn and abandoned, in her own empty house.
I haven’t got long,’ said Viv, looking up and down Oxford Street.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ answered Fraser, ‘to spare me any time at all.’
It was just after six. She had told him, at lunch-time, to come back, and had met him here, in front of the wrecked John Lewis building. She was anxious that Helen might still be about, and might see them; but when he saw her glancing nervously around, he misunderstood. The pavement was filled with people going briskly home from work or queueing for buses, and he thought she was bothered by the crowd. He said, ‘No, we can’t talk here, can we? Let me take you to a café, somewhere quiet.’ He touched her arm.
But she said she didn’t have time for that; that she was meeting someone in forty-five minutes, in another part of town. So they walked, instead, around the corner to one of the benches in Cavendish Square. The bench was covered with fallen leaves, golden and glossy as scraps of yellow mackintosh. He swept them away so that she could sit.
She sat rather rigidly, with her hands in her pockets and her coat buttoned up. When he offered her a cigarette she shook her head. He put the cigarettes away and took out a pipe.
She watched him thumbing in the tobacco. He was like a kid, she thought, mucking about. She said, without smiling, ‘I wish you hadn’t come to my office today, Mr Fraser. I don’t know what Miss Giniver thought.’
‘She looked as though she thought I was going to fling her to the floor and ravish her, to tell you the truth!’ he said. And then, when Viv wouldn’t smile: ‘I’m sorry. It just seemed the most straightforward way to see you.’
‘I still don’t know why you felt you needed to see me at all. Has my brother done something to you?’
‘It’s nothing like that.’
‘He didn’t ask you to come?’
‘It’s just as I told you earlier on. Your brother had nothing to do with it. He doesn’t even know I’m here. He only mentioned to me, in passing, where you work. But he speaks so warmly of you. It’s clear’—he held a flame to the pipe, sucking on the stem of it—‘it’s clear you mean a great deal to him. It was the just the same, I remember, when we were in prison.’
He made no attempt to muffle the word, and Viv flinched. He saw, and lowered his voice. ‘It was the same, I should have said, when I first knew him. He used to look forward to your visits more than to anything else in the world.’
She looked away. At the words ‘your visits’ she’d had a very clear and unpleasant memory of herself, her father, and Duncan at one of the tables in the visiting-room at Wormwood Scrubs. She remembered the press of other visitors, the look of the men, the awful babble, the sour, airless feel of the room. She remembered Fraser himself from those days, too—for she’d seen him, more than once. She recalled his brash public-schoolboy’s laugh; she remembered one of the other visitors saying, ‘Isn’t it a shame?’ and a man actually calling out to him: ‘Can’t you take it, conchy?’ She’d felt rather sorry for him, then. She’d thought him brave, but brave in a pointless kind of way. He hadn’t changed anything, after all. She’d felt more sympathy for his parents. She could still picture his mother, at the scratched prison table: a smart, kind, softly spoken woman, dreadfully wounded-looking and pale.
Duncan, of course, even then, had thought Fraser marvellous. He thought anyone marvellous who could talk cleverly, in a well-bred voice. Viv had arrived at Mr Mundy’s on Tuesday night, and he had come to let her in, his dark eyes flashing with excitement. ‘Guess who I met! You never will! He’s coming round here, later on.’ He’d sat listening out for Fraser, all evening; and when, a little later, Fraser had actually turned up, he’d leapt to his feet and gone rushing to the door…
It had all filled Viv with dismay. She and Mr Mundy had sat, uncomfortable, self-conscious, hardly knowing where to look.
Now she watched Fraser fiddling about with the pipe, and said, ‘I still don’t know what it is you want me to do.’
He laughed. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, neither do I.’
‘You said you’re writing for a newspaper or something like that. You’re not going to write about Duncan, are you?’
He looked as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’
‘Because if that’s what all this is about—’
‘It’s not “about” anything at all. How suspicious you are!’ He began to laugh again. But when she still looked grave, he put back his hair, and changed his tone.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know it’s queer, my coming along out of the blue like this. I suppose it seems odd to you, my taking an interest in your brother after so long. I don’t quite know myself why I should feel so strongly about it. It was just, coming across him so suddenly at the candle-works that time; thinking of somebody like him having to work in a place like that! And then—my God! Seeing him with Mr Mundy! I couldn’t believe it. He’d told me where he was living and I thought he was joking! I can’t tell you the start it gave me, the first time he took me to the house. I’ve been back there since, two or three times, and it still unnerves me. Has your brother really been there ever since his release? Right from the day he got out? It seems incredible.’
‘It’s what he wanted,’ said Viv. She added: ‘Mr Mundy’s been very kind.’
It sounded feeble, even to her. Fraser raised his eyebrows. ‘He’s certainly got things nice and cosy. I’m just thinking back, to when we were inside. He was plain Mr Mundy then, of course. There was none of this “Uncle Horace” business. I thought I was hearing things, the first time I heard that!’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘Don’t your family mind?’
‘Why should they?’
‘I don’t know. It seems an odd sort of life, that’s all, for a boy like Duncan. He’s not even a boy any more, is he? And yet it’s impossible to think of him as anything else. He might have got stuck. I think he has got stuck. I think he’s made himself be stuck, as a way of—of punishing himself, for all that happened, years ago, all that he did and didn’t do…I think Mr Mundy is taking very good care to keep him stuck; and—if you don’t mind my saying so—after seeing the way you were with him on Tuesday night, I don’t think anyone else is doing anything to, as it were, unstick him. All that fascination of his with things from the past, for instance.’
‘That’s just a hobby,’ said Viv.
‘It’s a pretty morbid one, don’t you think? For a boy like him?’
She lost her patience suddenly. ‘“A boy like him,”’ she said.
‘“A boy like him.” People have always said that about Duncan, ever since he was little. “A boy like him shouldn’t be at a school like this, he’s too sensitive for it.” “A boy like him should go to college.”’
Fraser frowned at her. ‘Did it occur to you that those people might have been saying it because it was true?’
‘Of course it was true! But what was the point of it? And look where it got him! We had to deal with all that, Mr Fraser—my family and I, not you. Four years, going back and forth to that awful place. Four years, and more, fretting about it. It nearly killed my father! Perhaps if Duncan had been like you when he was young—had the things you had, I mean, the same sort of people around him, the same sort of start—perhaps things would have been different. He went to Mr Mundy’s when he came out because he felt he’d nowhere else. Where were you, then? If you’re so big a friend of his, where were you?’
Fraser looked away, lowered the pipe, turned it in his fingers, and didn’t answer. She went on more quietly, ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. But I can’t help thinking your coming along like this—Well, what’s it going to do? When Duncan told me he’d met you, I’ll be quite honest with you, I wished he hadn’t. What’s the good of it? It’s not going to get him anywhere. It’s just going to give him ideas again; it’s just going to stir things up and upset him.’
He was fishing for matches, and spoke stiffly. ‘You could let him decide that for himself, of course.’
‘But you know what he’s like. You said, just now. He’s got a sort of—a sort of wisdom about some things; but in so many ways he’s still more or less a boy. He can be pushed into things, like a boy can. He can be—’
She stopped. Fraser had the box of matches in his hand but had turned, and was looking at her. ‘What do you think,’ he asked her slowly, ‘I’m going to push him into?’
She swallowed, and dropped her gaze. ‘I don’t know.’
He went on, ‘You’re thinking of that boy, aren’t you? The boy who died? Alec?’ And then, when she looked up, he nodded. ‘Yes. You see, I know all about him…You don’t think I’m like him, though, surely?’ She didn’t answer. He coloured, as if angry. ‘Is that what you think? Because if you do—Well, I could give you a list of girls, you know, who could put you straight on that!’
