by Sarah Waters
‘I know,’ he answered, rubbing his chin against her forehead. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No.’
‘Good girl. To have to start messing about with razors, now, would just about kill me. God! I had a bloody awful time of it getting down here.’
‘Are you sorry you came?’
He kissed her again. ‘Sorry? I’ve been thinking of this all day.’
‘Only all day?’
‘All week. All month. For ever. Oh, Viv.’ He kissed her harder. ‘I’ve missed you like hell.’
‘Wait,’ she whispered, pulling away.
‘I can’t. I can’t! All right. Let me look at you. You look beautiful, you fabulous girl. I saw you downstairs and, I swear to God, it was all I could do to keep my hands off you; it was like torture.’
They moved further into the room, hand in hand. He stood rubbing his eyes, looking about. The bulb in the lamp was dim; even so, he saw enough, and made a face.
‘This joint is a bit of a hole, isn’t it? Morrison said it was OK. I think it’s worse than the Paddington one.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said.
‘It’s not all right. It breaks my heart. You wait till after the war, when I’m back on a proper man’s pay. It’ll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time.’
‘I won’t care where it is,’ she said.
‘You wait, though.’
‘I won’t care where it is, so long as you’re there.’
She said it almost shyly. They looked at each other—just looked at each other, getting used to the sight of each other’s faces. She hadn’t seen him for a month. He was stationed near Worcester, and got to London every four or five weeks. That was nothing, she knew, in wartime. She knew girls with boyfriends in North Africa and Burma, on ships in the Atlantic, in POW camps. But she must be selfish, because she hated time, for keeping him from her even for a month. She hated it for making them strangers to each other, when they ought to be closest. She hated it for taking him away from her again, when she’d just got used to him.
Perhaps he saw all this in her face. He pulled her to him, to kiss her again. But when he felt the press of her against him he moved back, remembering something.
‘Hang on,’ he said, unbuttoning the flap of his jacket pocket. ‘I’ve got a present for you. Here.’
It was a paper case of hair-grips. She’d been complaining, when she saw him last, about how she had run out. He said, ‘One of the boys at the base was selling them. It’s not much, but—’
‘They’re just the thing,’ she said shyly. She was touched by his having remembered.
‘Are they? I thought they would be. And look, don’t laugh.’ He’d coloured slightly. ‘I brought you these, too.’
She thought he was going to give her cigarettes. He’d produced a bashed-up packet. But he opened it very carefully, then took hold of her hand and gently tipped the contents out into her palm.
They turned out to be three wilting snowdrops. They fell in a tangle of fine green stems.
He said, ‘They’re not broken, are they?’
‘They’re beautiful!’ said Viv, touching the tight bud-like white flowers, the little ballerina skirts. ‘Where did you get them?’
‘The train stopped for forty-five minutes, and half of us blokes got out for a smoke. I looked down and there they were. I thought—Well, they made me think of you.’
She could see he was embarrassed. She pictured him stooping to pick the flowers, then putting them into that cigarette packet—doing it quickly, so that his friends wouldn’t see. Her heart seemed too big, suddenly, for her breast. Again she was afraid that she might cry. But she mustn’t do that. Crying was stupid, was pointless! Such a dreadful waste of time. She lifted a snowdrop and gently shook it, then looked at the basin.
‘I should put them in water.’
‘They’re too far gone. Pin them to your dress.’
‘I haven’t got a pin.’
He took up the hair-grips. ‘Use one of these. Or—Here, I’ve a better idea.’
He fixed the flowers to her hair. He did it rather fumblingly; she felt the point of the grip cut slightly into her scalp. But then he held her face in his swarthy hands, and looked her over.
‘There,’ he said. ‘I swear to God, you get more beautiful every time I see you.’
She went to the mirror. She didn’t look beautiful at all. Her face was flushed, her lipstick smeared by his kisses. The stems of the flowers had got crushed by the grip and hung rather limply. But the white of them was vivid, lovely, against the black-brown of her hair.
She turned back to the room. She oughtn’t to have moved away from his arms. They seemed to feel the distance, suddenly, and grew shy with each other again. He went to the armchair and sat down, unfastening the top two buttons of his jacket and loosening the collar and tie beneath. After a little silence he cleared his throat and said, ‘So. What do you want to do tonight, glamour girl?’
She lifted a shoulder. ‘I don’t know. I don’t mind. Whatever you like.’ She just wanted to stay here with him.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘We could go out.’
‘If you want to.’
‘I wish we had some drink.’
‘You’ve just had one!’
‘Some whisky, I mean.’
Another silence. She felt herself getting chilly again. She moved to the radiator, and rubbed her arms, as she had before.
He didn’t notice. He’d gone back to looking around the room. He asked, as if politely, ‘You didn’t have any trouble finding this place?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it was easy.’
‘Were you working today, or what?’
She hesitated. ‘I went to see Duncan,’ she said, looking away, ‘with Dad.’
He knew about Duncan—at least, he knew where Duncan was. He thought he was in for stealing money. His manner changed. He looked at her properly again.
‘Poor baby! I thought you seemed a bit blue. How was it?’
‘It was all right.’
‘It’s stinking, you having to go to a place like that!’
‘He doesn’t have anyone else, except Dad.’
‘It’s lousy, that’s all. If it was me, and my sister—’
He stopped. There had come the bang of a closing door, amazingly close; and now voices started up, on the other side of the wall. A man’s and a woman’s, slightly raised, perhaps in argument: the man’s sounding most clearly, but both of them muffled, fitful, like the squeals made by a cloth as it polished a table.
‘Hell!’ whispered Reggie. ‘That’s all we need.’
‘Do you think they can hear us?’
‘Not if we’re quiet; and not if they carry on like that. Let’s hope they do! The fun’ll start if they decide to kiss and make up.’ He smirked. ‘It’ll be like a race.’
‘I know who’d win,’ she said at once.
He pretended to be hurt. ‘Give a fellow a chance!’
He looked her over, in a new sort of way, then held out his hand and said, in a coaxing voice, ‘Come here, glamour girl.’
She shook her head, smiling, and wouldn’t go to him.
‘Come here,’ he said again; but she still wouldn’t go. So he rose, and reached for her fingers, and drew her to him—pulling at her arm as a sailor pulls on a rope, hand over hand. ‘Look at me,’ he murmured as he did it. ‘I’m a drowning man. I’m a goner. I’m desperate, Viv.’
He kissed her again, lightly enough, at first; but then, as the kiss went on, they both grew serious, almost grim. The stir of feelings which, a moment before, had been gathered about her heart, expanded further. It was as if he were drawing all the life of her to the surface of her flesh. He began to move his hands over her, cupping and working her hips and buttocks, pressing her to him so that she could feel, through her flimsy dress, the points and bulges of his uniform jacket, the but
tons and the folds. He began to grow hard: she felt the movement of it, inside his trousers, against her belly. An amazing thing, she thought it, even now; she’d never got used to it. Sometimes he’d move her hand to it. ‘That’s thanks to you,’ he might say, jokily. ‘That’s all yours. That’s got your name on it.’ But today he said nothing. They were both too serious. They pulled and pressed at each other as if ravenous for the other’s touch.
She was aware of the voices, still sounding fitfully in the neighbouring room. She heard someone walk, whistling a dance tune, past the door. Down in the stairwell a gong was rung, calling guests to dinner. She and Reggie kissed on, at the centre of it all, silent and more or less still, but, as it seemed to her, enveloped by a storm of motion and noise: the rushing of breath, of blood, of moisture, the straining of fabric and of skin.
She began to move her hips against his. He let her do it for a moment, then pulled away.
‘Jesus!’ he whispered, wiping his mouth. ‘You’re killing me!’
She drew him back. ‘Don’t stop.’
‘I’m not going to stop. I just don’t want to finish before I’ve started. Hang on.’
He took off his jacket and threw it down, then shrugged off his braces. He put his arms around her again and walked her to the bed, meaning to lie her down on it. As soon as they sank upon it, however, it creaked. It creaked, whichever spot they tried. So he spread his jacket out on the floor and they lay down together on that.
He pulled up her skirt and ran his hand over the bare part of her leg, beneath her buttock. She thought of the crêpe dress getting creased, her precious fairy-worked stockings snagging, but let the thought go. She turned her head, and the snowdrops tumbled from her hair and were squashed, and she didn’t care. She caught the dusty, nasty smell of the hotel carpet; she pictured all the men and women who might have embraced on it before, or who might be lying like this, now, in other rooms, in other houses—strangers to her, just as she and Reggie were strangers to them…The idea was lovely to her, suddenly. Reggie lowered himself properly upon her and she let her limbs grow loose, giving herself up to the weight of him; but still moving her hips. She forgot her father, her brother, the war; she felt pressed out of herself, released.
The waiting about, Kay thought, was the hardest part; she had never got used to it. When the Warning went, at just after ten, she actually felt better. She stretched in her chair and yawned, luxuriously.
‘I’d like a couple of simple fractures tonight,’ she told Mickey. ‘Nothing too bloody; I’ve had enough blood and guts for a while. And no one too heavy. I nearly broke my back last week, on that policeman in Ecclestone Square! No, a couple of slim little girls with broken ankles would just about do it.’
‘I’d like a nice old lady,’ said Mickey, yawning too. She was lying on the floor, on a camping-mattress, reading a cowboy book. ‘A nice old lady with a bag of sweets.’
She had just put the book aside and closed her eyes when Binkie, the station leader, came into the common-room clapping her hands. ‘Wake up, Carmichael!’ she told Mickey. ‘No snoozing on the job. That was the Yellow, didn’t you hear? I should say we’ve an hour or two before the fun starts, but you never know. How about making a tour of the fuel stores? Howard and Cole, you can go, too. And put the water on, on your way, for the bottles in the vans. All right?’
There were various curses and groans. Mickey climbed slowly to her feet, rubbing her eyes, nodding to the others. They got their coats, and went out to the garage.
Kay stretched again. She looked at the clock, then glanced around for something to do: wanting to keep herself alert, and take her mind off the waiting. She found a deck of greasy playing cards, picked them up and gave them a shuffle. The cards were meant for servicemen, and had pictures of glamour girls on them. Over the years, ambulance people had given the girls beards and moustaches, spectacles and missing teeth.
She called to Hughes, another driver. ‘Fancy a game?’
He was darning a sock, and looked up, squinting. ‘What’s your stake?’
‘Penny a pop?’
‘All right.’
She shuffled her chair over to his. He was sitting right beside the oil-stove, and could never be persuaded away from it, for the room—which was part of the complex of garages under Dolphin Square, close to the Thames—had a concrete floor and walls of whitewashed brick, and was always chilly. Hughes wore a black astrakhan coat over his uniform and had turned up the collar. His hands and wrists, where they projected from his long, voluminous sleeves, looked pale and waxy. His face was slender as a ghost’s, his teeth very stained from cigarettes. He wore glasses with dark tortoiseshell frames.
Kay dealt him a hand, and watched him sorting delicately through his cards. She shook her head. ‘It’s like gaming with Death,’ she said.
He held her gaze, and extended a hand—pointed a finger, then turned and crooked it. ‘Tonight,’ he whispered in horror-film tones.
She threw a penny at him. ‘Stop it.’ The coin bounced to the floor.
‘Hey, what’s the idea?’ said someone—a woman called Partridge. She was kneeling on the concrete, cutting out a dress from paper patterns.
Kay said, ‘Hughes was giving me the creeps.’
‘Hughes gives everyone the creeps.’
‘This time he was actually meaning to.’
Hughes did his Death-act, then, for Partridge. ‘That’s not funny, Hughes,’ she said. When two more drivers passed through the room, he did it for them. One of them shrieked. Hughes got up and went to the mirror and did it for himself. He came back looking quite unnerved.
‘I’ve had a whiff of my own grave,’ he said, picking up his cards.
Presently Mickey came back in.
‘Any sense of what it’s like out there?’ they asked her.
She was rubbing her cold hands. ‘A few wallops over Marylebone way, according to R and D. Station 39 are out already.’
Kay caught her eye. She said quietly, ‘Rathbone Place all right, d’you think?’
Mickey took off her coat. ‘I think so.’ She blew on her fingers. ‘What’s the game?’
For a time there was relative silence. A new girl, O’Neil, got out a First Aid manual and started testing herself on procedure. Drivers and attendants drifted in and out. A woman who by day was a tutor in a dancing-school changed into a pair of woollen knickerbockers and started exercising: bending, stretching, lifting her legs.
At quarter to eleven they heard the first close explosion. Shortly after that, the ack-ack started up in Hyde Park. Their station was a couple of miles away from the guns: even so, the booms seemed to rise up from the concrete into their shoes, and the crockery and cutlery, out in the kitchen, began to rattle.
But only O’Neil, the new girl, exclaimed at the sound. Everyone else simply got on with what they were doing without looking up—Partridge pinning her paper patterns a little more swiftly, perhaps; the dancing-tutor, after a moment, going off to change back into her trousers. Mickey had taken off her boots; now, lazily, she pulled them on again and began to lace them. Kay lit a cigarette, from the stub of an old one. It was worth smoking more cigarettes than you really wanted, she felt, at this stage, to make up for the frantic time to come, when you might have to go without for hours at a stretch.
There was the rumble of another explosion. It seemed closer than the last. A teaspoon that had been travelling eerily across a table, as if pushed by spirits, now flew right off.
Somebody laughed. Somebody else said, ‘We’re in for it tonight, kids!’
‘Could be nuisance raiders,’ said Kay.
Hughes snorted. ‘Could be my Aunt Fanny. They dropped photograph flares last night, I swear it. They’ll be back for the railway lines, if nothing else—’
He turned his head. The telephone, in Binkie’s office, had started to ring. Everyone grew still. Kay felt a quick, sharp stab of anxiety, deep in her breast. The phone was silenced, as Binkie picked it up. They heard her voice, very cl
early: ‘Yes. I see. Yes, at once.’
‘Here we go,’ said Hughes, getting up, taking off his astrakhan coat.
Binkie came briskly into the common-room, pushing back her white hair.
‘Two incidents so far,’ she said, ‘and they’re expecting plenty more. Bessborough Place, and Hugh Street. Two ambulances and a car to the first; an ambulance and car to the second. Let’s make it’—she pointed from person to person, thinking it over as she spoke—‘Langrish and Carmichael, Cole and O’Neil, Hughes and Edwards, Partridge, Howard…All right, off you go!’
Kay and the other drivers at once went out into the garage, putting on their tin hats as they ran. The grey vans and cars stood parked and ready; Kay climbed into the cabin of hers and started its engine, pressing and easing off the accelerator pedal, warming it up. After a moment, Mickey joined her. She’d been to Binkie, to pick up the chit that would tell them more precisely what was needed and where they must go. She came quickly, hopping on to the running-board and climbing into the cabin as Kay moved off.
‘Which one did we get?’
‘Hugh Street.’
Kay nodded, swinging the van out of the garage and up the slope to the street, going slowly at first, so that Partridge, in the car behind, could catch up and follow, then putting her foot down. The van was an old commercial one that had been converted at the start of the war; she had to double-declutch with every gear change—a rather tiresome business. But she knew the vehicle and all its quirks, and went smoothly, confidently. Ten minutes before, playing cards with Hughes, she’d been almost dozy. At the ring of the telephone there had come that stab of anxiety around her heart. Now she felt—not unafraid, because only a fool would be unafraid in a job like this; but awake, alert, alive in all her limbs.
They had to go north-west to get to Hugh Street, and the route was a grim one, the shabby houses at the heart of Pimlico giving way, with dismal regularity, to patches of devastated land, to mounds of rubble, or hollowed-out terraces. The ack-ack guns still pounded on; between bursts of fire Kay could make out, too, the dreary throb of aircraft, the occasional whistle and whizz of bombs and rockets. The sounds were very like those of an ordinary Guy Fawkes night, from before the war; the smells, however, were different: not the simple-minded smell—as Kay thought of it now—of ordinary gunpowder, but the faint stink of burning rubber from the guns, and the putrid scent of exploded shells.
